


Saudade

by ncfan



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Developing Relationship, Dreams, Early Second Age Elrond is not in a healthy headspace, Gen, Himring, Holding Hands, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Lindon (Tolkien), M/M, Nightmares, Second Age, Slow Burn, Tol Himling, Tolkien Decameron Project, Trauma, and there are characters who are not present and yet loom large, disturbing imagery, honestly Celebrimbor’s headspace isn’t looking that great either, other characters have cameos - Freeform, the sea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:15:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 201,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25366690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: Early in the Second Age, Elrond is a loremaster-in-training (self-taught, but not any less well-taught for that, thank you) in Gil-galad’s court. He does not speak of his past, and does not take to inquiries with good grace. But when he receives an assignment that will take him to one of the few remnants of the drowned lands of his childhood, he finds that his past is not so easily ignored as all that. Gil-galad’s choice of traveling companion for him does not help matters. At all.
Relationships: Celebrimbor | Telperinquar/Elrond Peredhel
Comments: 67
Kudos: 146
Collections: The Tolkien Decameron Project





	1. Chapter One

For all his life, Elrond had had a title that counted for very little. In the refugee camp in the Lisgardh, he and Elros had been the twin princes of the Iathrim, sons of Queen Elwing and Lord Eärendil. Or, if you were to talk to the Gondolindrim instead of the Iathrim, sons of Queen Elwing and Prince Eärendil. Or, depending on certain _other_ people you could have spoken to, Princess Elwing and any title you cared to stick to Eärendil that did not ignore the fact that his mother was, even if absent, still living, and most people had by then decided that really, the fact that Idril was never considered her father’s heir had been a perhaps _unwise_ decision on the parts of everyone who had decided that it would be so, and also of everyone who had then allowed Idril to go _on_ not being her father’s heir.

In the cluster of quivering, terrified bodies rank with fearful sweat that had passed for a settlement, Elrond and Elros had been twin princes. Those times were hazy in the depths of Elrond’s memory, like a dream that had stumbled momentarily into the waking world, and turned all the living soil into the barren and reeking land of a nightmare. The air had been sharp with salt, and sharper with the sour cast of fear. There were times when he strained his memory backwards, but there were those who had told him that there was little to be found in memories of the Lisgardh that were actually worth remembering.

What Elwing had wrought with the Silmaril, they would sometimes murmur, _that_ was worth remembering. That did not make Elrond turn his mind to searching for the past with any renewed zeal. What it was was a surefire way to make his curiosity shrivel into the shape of a burned prune, and a surefire way to ensure that he would put his curiosity to bed for the rest of the day and possibly even to ensure that he would be good for nothing except giving voice to every last bitter thing that lived inside of him.

You would be surprised by how many bitter things Elrond could fit inside of him. Most people were, and most of the times, he had entirely too much to do to pause for more than a few moments to let them give voice to their bitterness. But there were times when the bitterness was more him than he was, and there were times when to force those bitter things to be silent felt entirely too much like murdering the most vital parts of himself to be borne. The exhaustion that came after giving voice to his bitterness, that moment of draining like he had spent hours pouring his sweat into the earth for his toil, it was right. Not rejuvenating, but right.

(There were times when he wished he heard less of Elwing. There were times when he wished he heard more of Elwing. There were times when he wished he knew nothing of her, when he wished he could excise every last bit of himself that had come from her, and there were times when he wished that he could have her at his side and never be obliged to part from her again. Trying to explain this to others was pointless—there had only been one who could ever make sense of it, and he was…

He was elsewhere.

And it was pointless also, for those few who had some idea of the tangle that was Elrond’s feelings towards his mother had no idea exactly why there was no such turmoil when it came to his father.

Well. That was quite simple, was it not? What sort of complicated feelings were you supposed to have for a _star_? Elrond had sworn no oaths regarding the Silmarils. To him, they were pretty jewels that had led to the utter ruin of the world that had once been his. A star was far too remote to conceive the sort of tangled, messy, gory feelings that were his when he turned his mind to Elwing. There was just nothing there to form a connection, no matter how the connection might burn.)

Elrond and Elros had been princes in the Lisgardh, and though Elrond remembered the Lisgardh the way he remembered a dream he had dreamed five years ago while drunk on yule wine, he remembered that, even then, even as a little child who could on account of his age could take no part in what passed for the governance of the refugee camp in the Lisgardh, he remembered that to be a prince meant to carry a burden. To be a prince meant to carry the hopes of people whom you could not protect and could not save. Elwing was little more than a phantasm of salt and water in the back of Elrond’s mind—when he tried to summon her face, he saw only the reflection of his own, warped into a feminine cast—but he did remember that she had spent so much of her time listening to the cares and the woes of the people who claimed her for their queen that by the end of it, by the time she had _any_ time to turn her gaze to her sons, she looked half-eaten without having even been touched.

Elrond had imagined it, being a prince and a grown man, and going about life half-eaten without being touched. Even as a little child who could scarcely imagine all that his mother must do as queen, ‘prince’ had seemed to him a burden, and a burden that counted for very little in return. There was no difference in their living conditions and in the living conditions of any other child in the Lisgardh. He was perhaps more fortunate than them in that, unlike those other children (not that there were very many), he did not bear his burdens alone, but he was still hungry all of the time, and he was still afraid, even if he was a very small child who as a consequence knew not what exactly he was supposed to be afraid of.

(Gil-galad was still wont to stare at him in disbelief when Elrond related what little he remembered of conditions in the Lisgardh. They had shared certain conditions of childhood—Gil-galad had also spent much of his childhood in a refugee camp. But the Isle of Balar, while as far from paradise as the shores of Ennor were from the shores of Valinor, had been as far from the camp in the Lisgardh as the vanished shores of Beleriand were to the foothills of the Ered Luin. The fact that a town there remained to this day, and that while it was largely depopulated these days, there were some among the Edhil who had chosen to go on living there in spite of the fact that they didn’t belong to any faction who might be looked upon unfavorably in this Second Age of Anor was, Elrond thought, starkly illustrative. Had the Lisgardh not been drowned beneath the tears of a hundred thousand different vengeful Ainur, Elrond doubted anyone would have chosen to go back to it. He would not have chosen to go back to it.)

Then, after he had been one of two Iathrim princes in a refugee camp, he had been one of two Iathrim princes in an _enemy_ refugee camp—Amon Ereb might have _technically_ qualified as a fortress, but the places they had lived after it had crumbled were, no denying it, refugee camps. And perhaps ‘enemy’ was not quite the right… not quite the…

There were no words for it that ever felt quite right. Others had tried to put the words in Elrond’s mouth, tried to force the syllables down his throat, and they had to a man discovered that such a venture was both unwise and perilous. Elrond had no words for it that were his own. He had on hand some words that others had attempted to mold into becoming his own, but they had never been molded so thoroughly that Elrond could not instantly tell that they were not his. He did not accept foreign words in the place of those that came organically from within. He did not accept others attempting to define those years for him.

Elrond and Elros had spent decades in the camp of those who had gone to battle against their mother’s people, and the fact that they were princes of the Iathrim had meant enough to those people that they, for the most part, had only ever referred to them by the rank that was theirs by dint of their mother being who she was. There had been no children in that camp but them, and looking back on it, Elrond thought that most of the people there had been wont to spoil them because of it, but nearly all of those had still referred to them as the twin princes, rather than ‘Elrond and Elros’, or ‘Elros and Elrond.’ Those who had ever called them ‘Elwing’s boys’ were…

Well. They were special cases, those who had called Elrond and his brother ‘Elwing’s boys.’ They could not be compared to the rest.

In the camp of those who had gone to battle against their mother’s people, Elrond and Elros had been counted princes, but they were still just as hungry as they had been in the Lisgardh. They were hungry, and now that they were older and had seen blood and slaughter and come close to falling to the sword themselves, they understood far better than they had in the Lisgardh all that they had to fear from the world. They had their hunger and they had their fear and they were growing older but they had not even the responsibilities, meager as they might have been, that might have been theirs if they had grown to manhood in the Lisgardh at their mother’s side. It was not allowed. They had been hostages, but there were other reasons for it as well, reasons owing to fear and tenderness and privation and, by the end, perhaps madness as well. A slow, creeping madness that presented itself as desolation and lethargy and inertia and a draining interest in continuing the education of—

It was difficult to tread past this point. At the absolute best of times, ‘difficult’ was the kindest word Elrond could find to describe it. It was difficult to tread past this point, but what that meant was that Elrond often found himself trapped there in the interstice between past and present, his body pushed into the non-space in the inked lines of the borders. It was not a comfortable place to be.

He had borne the burdens of that time alongside his brother. Those burdens were lighter when it was Elrond and Elros together, for they were in the same situation together and they knew each other’s minds and hearts. They did not have to hide anything from one another. They did not have to put on masks of their faces to each other. The burdens that they bore were less when they sat awake and alone together in the long watches of the night. The burden of ‘prince’ when it came with no kingdom, no people, no duties, no responsibilities, and a world of obligations that chained them to a shattered past and the ghosts of kin they had never heard or seen, that was a weighty burden to bear, but when it was shared between two who knew the other’s mind and heart, it was not so unbearable as all that.

In this Second Age of Anor, Elrond could count a kingdom sunk beneath the waves as another of the obligations chaining him to a shattered past, and he did not share the burden with one who knew his mind and heart any longer. Elros had gone away, to be a Man and be king over a race of Men who were like the Edain, but granted a greater measure of the Rodyn’s gifts. Elros had gone away, to be king over a kingdom that was a distant island, far out in the Sea. Elros had taken on new obligations that did not seem anything like as much of a burden on him as being queen over the Iathrim had been a burden on their mother, and Elrond was left here on the new, craggy shore, to bear the burdens that had dogged him from earliest childhood.

He bore those burdens alone, and something new had come to him, something that never failed to infuriate, even though he had been confronted by it many, _many_ times.

Elrond was the son of a queen, and the brother of a king, and he supposed, when he could be bothered to think of it in such terms in this Second Age of Anor, when the map had literally been changed by the wishes of Ilúvatar and the world they inhabited was very different than the world they had entered into, that this made him a prince twice over. When he went to visit Elros in Elenna, the people Elros had chosen to rule certainly seemed to regard Elrond as a prince and honored him as such, even though Elrond had no part in the governance of Elenna, even though he didn’t even _live_ there. He did not think that his visits there, though they could get quite length, really counted for living there, and while he’d occasionally given his brother advice, Elros largely knew exactly what he was doing and knew exactly what he wanted to do in future, and serving at his brother’s ear from time to time did not really count as acting as a councilor to Elenna’s king. The people of Elenna treated him as a prince, nonetheless, blithely uncaring of Elrond’s objections.

On the shores of the Sea in Eriador, there were many who counted Elrond a prince as well, and had decided that this made him a person of some importance. In this Second Age of Anor, Elrond was considered far more important by the world at large than he had been in the First Age of Anor, and when he was trying to live his life and do his job, the fact that there were many people who considered him important? Well, it was quite frankly a complete and total hassle.

-0-0-0-

He had wanted the assignment. From the moment word of it had begun to circulate through the royal court, he had _wanted_ this assignment. No, Elrond would not justify himself—Celeborn was invited to stop looking at him like he was tempted to take him to a healer to make sure he hadn’t hit his head recently, and Oropher was invited to stop making dark, muttered comments about nurture overcoming nature, since he already had one foot out the door, anyways. Oropher in particular, if he was so uncomfortable with the sheer Ñoldorin-ness of the royal court of the _High King of the Ñoldor_ , might do better to follow the example of his wife and join Duileth in the kingdom she was forging on the eastern side of the Hithaeglir. If Oropher wanted Doriath anew, he ought to go join his wife, for it sounded very much as if Duileth, true to the blood she shared with Elu Thingol, was trying to make Doriath anew east of the Hithaeglir, and was putting that blood to what she no doubt considered good use and was _indeed_ making Doriath anew.

Elrond… Elrond shared that blood as well, and had a thicker share of it than Duileth, for he had it directly from Thingol, even if three generations sat between him and the first king of Doriath, while Duileth was the daughter of the brother of the man himself. It did not feel like it sometimes, for Thingol seemed more like a figure of myth and legend from the eldest of eldest days than a man he might have called ‘grandfather’ had he lived, but he had been a feature of the temporal world once, and his legacy was Elrond’s legacy, if removed.

That legacy was…

Elrond did not think he would be visiting Duileth’s kingdom east of the Hithaeglir. Not even if he was requested to be part of an embassy from Gil-galad’s court.

Anyways, from the moment he had heard of it, and he had heard of it soon, for gossip flew on wings swift as those of an Eagle in _this_ court, Elrond had wanted this assignment. He wanted it, and he would not justify that wanting to _anyone_ , let alone himself. He was allowed to want things without properly knowing the reason why, was he not? Not everything had to have a reason, did it?

If anything, the reason for it was no doubt simply owing to his own professional curiosity. This was a new age of Anor, after all, and Elrond, always inquisitive, always wishing to know more of the workings of the world, even when he was a little child in the Lisgardh who had his brother and the tidal pools past the boundaries of the reeds for his primary, and sometimes only, diversions, had sought as an adult to make a career out of it. It had seemed sensible at the time—uncovering all of the workings of the world would keep him occupied for a _very_ long time, and would no doubt be a highly satisfying endeavor. The idea of drowning in the seas of knowledge that could come to live in his mind had an appeal that Elrond knew would make little sense to anyone else, for how could drowning in _anything_ be pleasant?, but he was a child of Beleriand, he had been a little child by the Sea where drownings had not been unheard of, and he thought that if he was just a touch preoccupied with drowning as a concept, he was _allowed_.

(There were rumors. There were always rumors of such infamous figures, even years and decades after they had wandered off the pages of history, wandered out of all knowledge. There were always rumors of such people, and it was generally considered ill-advised to pay those rumors any heed, for the rumors were constructed of speculation and moonshine and angry spite and rarely had much of anything to do with reality. Elrond could not help but listen, anyways, and each rumor filled him with dread.)

Elrond had wanted the assignment for himself, and always, it had seemed reasonably likely that he would be able to obtain it. There were few other loremasters-in-training at court, probably because there was no one here to train them. The process of self-teaching was… _contentious_ , not for everyone, and thus, Elrond had very few rivals for anything, when it came to lore in this court. (He sometimes wondered what it would be like to have a dedicated rival. Sometimes, he thought that having a rival might spur him on to study and train himself even more rigorously. Sometimes, he thought that if he was preoccupied by what some rival was doing, he would never get anything done, ever again. And Elrond was not _just_ a loremaster-in-training in this court, so he did need to maintain a certain level of productivity. So all in all, having a rival would likely have been a bad thing.) There was never going to be a great deal of competition for this assignment.

And besides that, even if Elrond had been one of a dozen, or even two dozen, loremasters-in-training clamoring for what assignments they could get, he did not think he would have had a great deal of competition for this one. Shrouded by the pall of misfortune, tainted with the stain of stigma, fragrant with the scent of blood, there were relatively few who wished these days to travel to Tol Himling. To travel to Himring-that-once-was.

But according to all reports, even the Orcs who had driven the keepers of the fortress from it had been unable to take Himring, and alone of the great keeps of the Eldar in Beleriand, Himring had never been sacked (By _anyone_ ). The years and the wind and the surf that roared up over the sides of the island had no doubt done their work upon it, but by all accounts, the stones of Himring had been strong enough withstand any amount of battering. What was contained within could very well remain intact.

Regardless of the contents, it was a treasure trove for any loremaster-in-self-training trying to gain more knowledge to their name. In this case, ‘accolades’ was almost entirely out of the question, for even the Ñoldor of this court, for the most part, did not particularly wish to remember the legacy of Tol Himling, or the abandoned fortress that yet loomed up out of the misty Sea.

If Elrond had come to the correct conclusions, he would have his pick of any number of artifacts to study, would have his pick of any number of sights that had gone unseen by the eyes of the Eldar or of Men for _centuries_. Why, then, was _anyone_ surprised that he still wished for the assignment to be his?

Well, at least Gil-galad was not surprised. There was that much, at least.

No, Gil-galad was introducing other difficulties.

“Leaving aside the practical difficulties of reaching the island alone—“ Gil-galad pinned him with a long, only slightly long-suffering stare, which Elrond supposed he would have to take as a net positive, considering that some of the long-suffering stares he could fix members of the court in when they came to him with especially ridiculous quarrels had been known to make those fixed in the stare regress to a child who just _knew_ they had done something spectacularly naughty, even if they didn’t quite have the maturity to understand what exactly what it was that they had done. “—Those difficulties making it impossible for one who is not a trained mariner to navigate the sea around Tol Himling, and improbable at _best_ for a trained mariner to safely reach the island unaided. You cannot go to Tol Himling without a ship that is fully-manned. Círdan will provide you one with no protest, and if you attempt to repeat your arguments to him,” Gil-galad added, pinning Elrond in a stare that was now markedly stern, “he will repeat _my_ arguments to you, but more adamantly. I will not let you go off by yourself.”

Elrond resisted the urge to get up and pace. They were alone in Gil-galad’s solar, a bright, sunny room facing the Sea, and if nothing else was true, he had never known Gil-galad to make anything of his pacing. There had been many evenings when they had been ensconced in this room, going over some missive or building plan or draft for a law that Gil-galad had not particularly wanted to take to a wider audience until he had gone over it with a smaller audience first, and Elrond had gotten up and paced. He had talked while he paced, sometimes. He had been silent while he paced, sometimes. He had made noises that were not speech while he paced, sometimes.

When others were present, Elrond’s pacing had not been without its interruptions. Celeborn would stare at him, brows drawn up so high they were nearly one with his hairline, before finally asking him if he was feeling quite alright. Galadriel would say nothing, but was somehow _always_ present in the training grounds the next time Elrond was there, and somehow always found an opening for a sparring session that saw him too winded and too drenched in sweat to do any pacing for the rest of the day (Sometimes the rest of the week, if she was especially adamant on aiming for his feet.) Thranduil had on one occasion offered him a cup of wine, but Elrond had not been pacing so intently that he couldn’t see Thranduil slipping something considerably stronger into the wine, and really, Thranduil was an _amateur_ at drugging people, let alone without their knowledge. Whatever the man had been trying to achieve with that, Elrond doubted highly that it would have worked the way he wanted to. Elrond did not particularly enjoy the experience of being peeled off of people’s ceilings; he would simply have to avoid any tonic Thranduil had on offer.

When it was just Gil-galad, well, Gil-galad had learned that Elrond was still capable of answering questions when he was pacing up and down the length of a room, if not literally burning a hole in the rug, then at least wearing a track in it that was immediately noticeable in the daylight. Gil-galad had learned that if Elrond was pacing, Elrond would become more agitated for being forced to stop pacing, and had had the grace to decide that he would rather the person he was asking for counsel was less agitated than he could have been than be sitting still and obviously wishing he was not. For whatever reason, Gil-galad regarded Elrond as someone who could be relied upon to provide sound counsel. Elrond was grateful that he was accorded certain indulgences in return.

Here, Elrond could have paced the day away, could have paced until Ithil turned the walls to milky white and Gil-galad’s fair face was shaped into a ghastly death mask by the harsh shadows that poured in through the seams in the floor and the walls. He could have done that, and short of needing him to leave to admit someone else, he thought that Gil-galad might have let him.

But lately, when Elrond paced, his eyes were drawn to the shadows cast by his pacing form. It would not have been so bad right now, when Anor was high in the sky and the shadows cast by his body would have been faint and indistinct, barely noticeable, really. But as the day lengthened and the shadows cast gained strength accordingly, his shadow would become darker, its boundaries more easily marked.

Lately, when Elrond paced, when his eyes were drawn to his shadow, all he could see were the silhouettes of pacing legs that were stretched too far, entirely too far to be his. No, surely they could not be his, even if the shadows of those legs were attached to _his_ body. Elrond saw those elongated legs out of the corner of his eye, and though they were connected to his body and could, even if their proportions were so incredibly off, only have been the shadows of his legs, his mind began to play tricks. His mind would play tricks, and those shadows no longer seemed like the shadows of _his_ legs, after all. They seemed as if they belonged to someone else entirely, someone who had also paced incessantly, his feet making a stern, drumming tattoo against worn, scratched stone floors, and then against the hard earth.

Elrond would think about that, and then he would be grateful if it took less than a day to stop thinking about it. As frustrated as he could get when finding himself unable to pace, the frustration was less consuming than the way he felt when he was thinking about that other person who had paced. He did not wish to go through life half-eaten.

And he also did not think that Gil-galad could be swayed on this point. If Gil-galad had reached the point where he was invoking _Círdan_ , there was very little hope left. But as for the other point…

Elrond nodded shortly. “Alright. I will allow that I am not an experienced enough sailor to reach the island unaided.”

And getting out and swimming there, even at this time of year, was more likely than not to end with Elrond explaining to the Doomsman exactly why he had considered this venture a good idea. The Doomsman being the sort of judge that he was, he would probably have ruled that Elrond had ended his life through his own devices and assigned him a harsher penalty as a result. Elrond wasn’t terribly interested in getting out of the Timeless Halls around the same time the Valar decided they were letting _Fëanor_ out. Honestly, he wasn’t interested in spending time in the Timeless Halls at all. So, yes, he would concede—not happily, but he _would_ concede—that he needed someone manning the ship he was to take to reach Tol Himling.

And _none_ of that explained what _else_ Gil-galad was insisting upon.

Elrond took a deep breath before going on. It was important to remember to breathe properly, for if he forgot to breathe properly, he would stop thinking properly, and cease to control his emotions properly. It was important to remember that he was supposed to gather more information _before_ drawing conclusions. It was important to remember that he did not yet have the information he needed to draw his conclusions. It was important to remember that if he turned this into an argument, he stood a chance of losing the assignment entirely.

Every last thing he knew it was important to remember were not enough, even all of them together, to take the sting out of the stipulation that Gil-galad had put down. Perhaps convincing him to remove the stipulation would be enough to ease it.

“But I do not understand why you insist that someone accompany me to Himring itself.” Another deep breath. Another deep breath was needed to keep the peevish note, horrifyingly like what had often entered into his voice when he was yet in his adolescence, out of his voice now. “I know that my training is not complete, but I _think_ it has progressed enough for me to recognize anything of value. I assure you, there is little chance of my tossing some rare artifact out of a window, let alone letting a book of lore fall into the Sea.”

“Elrond, this is not about your qualifications.”

In spite of himself, Elrond felt himself starting to bristle, just a little bit. He forced it down, hastily and clumsily. He had learned early on in this Second Age of Anor, in this new royal court in Lindon, that his anger was…

Well, perhaps the best way to describe his anger was that it was a snarling, spitting thing dragged from the flotsam and jetsam of a lost world and a lost Age, and that it was, in this Second Age of Anor when the rebuilding was underway and the travails of the last Age were things most people considered better consigned to their nightmares and never spoken of in the light of day, something that had very little space in which to exist. That Elrond’s anger had very little space in which to exist, this did nothing to strip it of its power. If anything, being reminded of it only gave strength to that anger, while imbuing that strength of a shifting, writhing pain that scraped uncomfortably against the underside of his skin. It made others uncomfortable, made them uncomfortable in ways that made him feel more than a little like the way his anger was treated. The feeling of being pressed between the margins was…

He still did not wish to go through life half-eaten. By anything.

Elrond took another deep breath. “Then what is it about?”

Gil-galad regarded him in silence a long moment, frowning in such a way as could mean so many different things. Gil-galad had an impressive repertoire of stares, but his frowns all tended to look much the same. Those who knew him had often said the same thing of Gil-galad’s father, that Orodreth’s frowns looked much the same as each other, regardless of whether they were frowns of anger or sadness or worry or irritation. Elrond had never met Orodreth, but he knew his son quite well, and he yet had some difficulty distinguishing one sort of frown from another.

Frowns were not typically how Gil-galad expressed anger. Elrond knew that much. The latest High King over the Ñoldor (in Ennor, anyways; Finarfin laid claim to the title in Valinor, and it was hardly as if Finarfin’s own grandson was going to contest the claim) expressed anger in tight lips that sat perfectly level on his face, quirking neither up nor down. He expressed anger in the increased brightness of his already bright eyes. He expressed anger in the sharpness of his voice. It did not come through in a frown. It never came through in a frown.

A cloud passed over Anor so far overhead, momentarily putting the many-windowed room in shadow. The shadows reached Gil-galad, sharpening the outline of his face and deepening his frown, though his eyes stayed bright. The way he looked when he frowned at Elrond, it always reminded Elrond of something, something he could not quite place. Never a comfortable feeling, that. There were those who were content to live in ignorance, but Elrond, though he was younger in years than many of the Edhil currently living in Lindon, was well-acquainted with the truth of a certain maxim: what you don’t know really _can_ hurt you. It can hurt you quite badly, if aren’t expecting it, if you don’t know to expect it, or if you do know to expect it and you choose instead to trust unwisely in ignorance as a refuge.

The desire for greater knowledge could not change the reality of Elrond’s ignorance. Asking Gil-galad for an explanation would have been no help. Besides making himself ridiculous in the attempt, he did not forget himself so completely as to forget how unreasonable a thing it would be to ask Gil-galad. They had met here, in Lindon, in the wake of a drowning continent and a war winding itself down the way a ravenous beast wound itself down after discovering that its prey were all dead and its stomach was full to bursting with blood and flesh. War would sleep, for now, and those who had escaped it would try to rebuild lives on the scarred and shattered soil they were left behind.

That was the world in which Elrond had met Gil-galad, and he knew full well that they had never met before that day. And yet, Gil-galad’s frowns reminded Elrond of something. He could not remember what. (He did not wish to remember what.)

There was not much use in dwelling upon this. So Elrond told himself, every time he found his mind dwelling upon it. So he told himself now. Gil-galad was himself, and Elrond was himself, and neither of them were the ghosts that others tried to ascribe to them. And oh, that was _absolutely_ something they both had experience of. So let Gil-galad have his frowns, and not be bothered over the fact that they were similar to his father’s, that they reminded something of Elrond that he could not name.

And please, at last, let him tell Elrond what this was all about.

“You,” Gil-galad murmured at last, tapping his finger against the polished wood of the table they sat at, “are determined to ignore what your ancestry has bestowed upon you.” The frown disappeared off of his mouth, to be replaced by a small, twitching smile, the sort Elrond rarely saw there, except when the long watches of the night grew very long indeed and Gil-galad started asking, casually, always casually, what Elrond thought would happen if he introduced the concept pioneered by Men known as trial by combat, apparently arbitrated by Ilúvatar or whatever gods Men who did not owe their ancestry to the Edain believed in, when some dispute he was attempting to mediate grew especially rancorous. If it was accompanied by a very particular eye-twitch, discussions of what could happen when the combatants were given weapons that had not been blunted might also occur. “Doriath is gone, and many of her people lie with her beneath the Sea. But there are yet those who remain, and though the Ñoldor are also much reduced—“ his smile turned wry, and twitched no longer “—you do not see me trying to repudiate what my blood obligates me to.”

This again. “Who should be regarded as Thingol’s heir has been a matter of much debate,” Elrond put forth cautiously. “Celeborn does not want the title, and Duileth has been… Well, establishing a kingdom far away from this place and declaring it a haven for Sindar _only_ is _certainly_ a declaration, but I’m not sure what _kind_ of declaration it may be.”

Gil-galad looked away, grimacing. “Duileth always has been isolationist,” he muttered. “Even on Balar, she set up a neighborhood that only the Iathrim could go in and out of. Falathrim were let in— _sometimes_. Everyone else had to find one of the Iathrim they were on good terms with if they needed something or someone out of that neighborhood.”

Elrond paused, frowning. He’d not heard this story. “How did she enforce that? Were there gates set up, and a gatekeeper?”

“Guards,” Gil-galad replied hollowly. “Guards with long, sharp spears.”

That… That would just about do it. But Elrond was still staring at Gil-galad in what he could describe only as naked disbelief. “And Círdan stood for that? And Galadriel and Celeborn tolerated it?” No use asking after Oropher or Thranduil. Thranduil had stayed in the Lisgardh—some of Elrond’s very faint, watery memories were of him—and Oropher? Well, Oropher had remained here when his wife had gone, but there were times when Elrond thought it to be simply because Oropher knew he would have been _far_ less inconvenient in his wife’s far-eastern kingdom.

“Círdan was one man,” Gil-galad said with an uncomfortable shrug of his shoulders. “And many of the Iathrim on the island—most of them, to be frank—were happy with the idea of another community that only they and their closest allies were allowed to travel in and out of. Galadriel and Celeborn were two people, and after everything that had led to the Iathrim having to go there in the _first place_ , many of the Iathrim regarded the Ñoldor as being of a kind barely better than Orcs. Things turned nasty with Galadriel in particular, though she was not the only target—Celebrimbor had to lie very low for a few years after one of the newcomers took him for his father and stabbed him.”

“ _What?!_ ”

“It was a light stabbing. The Edhel wasn’t aiming for any vital area; Celebrimbor has always told me that they were just trying to hurt him, not actually _kill_ him.” As if that was the _point_. “He was back in his forge within the week; learning Quenya by a single candle so that no one thought to look in there for him was edifying. Just not in the way Telpe intended. We never did find out just who it was who had stabbed him. Celebrimbor never saw their face, and if Duileth knew, she wasn’t giving them up.” Gil-galad grimaced once more, pressing a hand to his temple. “Do you know, I asked Círdan what he would have done if he had ever found the attacker, and Círdan told me that he wasn’t certain he could have done anything at all?

“’Rodnor, we do not execute our criminals. To send the man away would be as good as sending him to his death; it would be the same as executing him, except his death would be slower. We have no prisons in which to hold him. This is not a rich-enough community to make a payment of restitution to Celebrimbor a sensible measure. And forcing the man to serve Celebrimbor in his forge for any length of time would not be sensible, either, for if the man still harbors rage in his heart, it may be Celebrimbor’s cooling corpse we find the next time. I do not like leaving criminals to live their lives with no punishment for their crimes, but there is nothing I can do that would not make the problem worse. So leave it alone, and give Celebrimbor no grief when you go to him for your lessons.’”

(Unbeknownst to Elrond, that was not all that Círdan had said to Gil-galad. He had said things to him about pain and suffering, about cycles and vengeance and futility. Gil-galad had learned much from this, regardless of the fact that Círdan had spoken more in frustration than out of any desire to educate. Gil-galad had taken a lesson away from it, and it was a lesson he endeavored to remember every day that he was king. But that was another story.)

“I’m sure Celebrimbor found this greatly reassuring,” Elrond muttered. He could not claim to…

Well, he and Celebrimbor had had little to do with each other in this Second Age of Anor. It was Elrond’s choice (Though not Celebrimbor’s). Elrond could not claim to know Celebrimbor very well (though not for lack of trying on Celebrimbor’s part), but he knew very few people who would just brush off having been _stabbed_. Elrond didn’t think there was enough drugged wine in all the world to make _him_ overlook having been stabbed, let alone consider it as something of no great import. And then, to learn that those with the power to do something had chosen to do nothing, because of the conditions of the community and the power of the faction his attacker belonged to? No, Elrond did not think he could have taken that lying down. Perhaps, eventually, he could have been persuaded not to try and seek his attacker out for a confrontation, or at least an _explanation_ , but he didn’t think that, in Celebrimbor’s place, he would have ever been able to look at Círdan in quite the same way again.

But Gil-galad was shrugging. “Once he recovered enough to return to his work, I never heard Celebrimbor speak of it again, not unless he had been prompted to. He knew how things stood.” A wry smile tugged on his lips, at the same time that the clouds shifted away from Anor and the room was filled with sunlight again; the sunlight caught on the matching wry gleam in his eyes, turning the typical brightness to something like starlight, but so much less remote, so much less untouchable. “Well, regardless of who Thingol’s temporal successor can be claimed to be, it’s obvious that Duileth has inherited in full his _spirit_. I wish her joy of her kingdom for Sindar only. We’ll see how long it takes before the local Nandor and Avari pester her so much that she lets them in as well.”

“I give it five years,” Elrond muttered, considering what he remembered of his great (and he knew there were a few more ‘greats’ than that, but he didn’t take the time to count them most days; Duileth had never counted the number of ‘greats’ in great-nephew, after all) aunt. Hard against the Ñoldor (hard enough that he still wondered why she had ever settled in Lindon at all), but all of the rest, she regarded as either her people, or close to it. “At most.”

“Hmm.” Gil-galad’s eyes flickered to the far wall, and for a moment, Elrond thought he might have succeeded in putting Gil-galad off of the topic entirely, but then, his eyes were on Elrond’s face again, and Elrond knew the effort had been in vain. “Elrond.” The gentleness of his voice was no consolation. The gentleness of his voice pointed towards one thing in particular, and that thing was perhaps the exact opposite of consolation. “Regardless of the state of Thingol’s inheritance, you are his only direct descendant currently living, to be counted among the Eldar. Thingol had one child, and Lúthien had one child, and of Dior’s children, two were lost in the dark and the snow—“

Elrond knew of them. Something lodged deep in the recesses of his mind told him that his mother had spoken to him and to Elros of Eluréd and Elurín. But that was not where the clearest memories of his uncles came from. That was not where it came from at all.

“—and your mother is—“

“My mother is on the other side of the Sea,” Elrond said shortly, and let the tone of his voice serve as the shutting of a door.

If Gil-galad could not hear the door shutting, he at least seemed aware that there was a door _there_. He nodded, breathing deeply. “Your brother has chosen a different path. That leaves you. Even if you do not claim the headship of his house, you still carry his blood and his legacy. There has been trouble on the road with bandits; only to the south of here, so far, but what if you find that that has changed? And who knows what you may find when you reach the island itself? You should not go alone. _No one_ should go alone, but if you were to go alone, and you were lost on the road, it would grieve many.”

It would be another bone of contention between the Ñoldor and the Sindar, he meant. Both sides could claim Elrond as one of his own, thanks to his ancestry, but the Sindar were… Well, ‘ambivalent’ was a word for what they were, considering where Elrond had spent the majority of his formative years, but even to those who were exceptionally and vocally ambivalent, the blood of Elu Thingol and Melian the Queen counted for something. To some of them, it counted for a great deal. To Elrond, it counted for many of them far more than he wished for it to.

Even to those who were ambivalent on the subject of Elrond, himself, the blood of Elu Thingol and Melian the Queen counted for something, and to lose the last carrier of that blood in Ennor who was yet counted among the Eldar, when the carrier of that blood was in the service of the High King of the Ñoldor, well… Elrond supposed that Gil-galad’s concerns were at least comprehensible. In this Second Age of Anor, it had been mutually and silently agreed upon that the Edhil were not going to go to war with each other over any sort of insult anymore, be it the perceived theft of a treasure or the death of a person deemed important to one faction or another. It had been agreed upon that now that the… _instigators_ were gone, there could be nothing that could even be _construed_ as a justification for kinslaying, on anyone’s parts (Though most people tended to look at the nearest Ñoldo when they made that particular remark).

War was out of the question, or so Elrond hoped. But he knew how many ways people could make other people’s lives uncomfortable for them without war being involved. In his time in this royal court, Elrond had had time to become intimately acquainted with all of the ways people could make other people’s lives uncomfortable for them without war being involved. As aggravating as it was, he supposed he should spare Gil-galad the trouble, if he could.

“It would grieve _me_ for you to come to harm when I could have prevented it,” Gil-galad told him then, more softly. He was not smiling, but there was a softness in his face to match the softness in his voice.

And with that, Elrond felt what resistance was left him, like hot air escaping from a kettle after the lid was removed and it met the frigid air of a room locked in winter. “I… Very well.” Himring was not a small fortress. There would still be plenty of opportunities for him to find solitude, still opportunities for him to do _some_ things for himself. “Who do you propose to send with me? I warn you, I have no intention of holding the hand of some greenhorn the whole time.”

Gil-galad’s laughter, when it came, was sweeter than most other laughter Elrond had occasion to hear, even in these days of peace. “What a way for a self-taught loremaster-in-training to talk.” Before Elrond could retort, he held up a hand for silence. “And no, Elrond, I do not intend to saddle you with a greenhorn. I am not trying to drive you over the Hithaeglir. Of those I trust and might send on this trip with you, only one has been to Himring before, and only he knows all of the signs and passwords you may need, if the fortress’s protections are still intact. He will accompany you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Telpe** —Celebrimbor
> 
>  **Anor** —the Sindarin name for the Sun  
>  **Edain** —Men of the three houses (the Houses of Bëor, Hador and Haleth) who were faithful to the Elves throughout the First Age; after the War of Wrath they were gifted with the land of Númenor and became known as the Dúnedain; after the Akallabêth they established Arnor and Gondor (singular: Adan) (Sindarin)  
>  **Edhel** —Elf (plural: Edhil) (Sindarin)  
>  **Edhil** —Elves (singular: Edhel) (Sindarin)  
>  **Eldar** —‘People of the Stars’ (Quenya); a name first given to the Elves by Oromë when he found them by Cuiviénen, but later came to refer only to those who answered the summons to Aman and set out on the March, with those who chose to remain by Cuiviénen coming to be known as the Avari; the Eldar were composed of these groups: the Vanyar, Ñoldor (those among them who chose to go to Aman), and the Teleri (including their divisions: the Lindar, Falmari, Sindar and Nandor).  
>  **Elenna** —‘Starwards’ (Quenya); a name of Númenor, derived from the guidance of Eärendil given to the Edain on their initial voyage to Númenor at the beginning of the Second Age  
>  **Ennor** —Middle-Earth (Sindarin)  
>  **Ered Luin** —“The Blue Mountains” (Sindarin); the mountain range at the far western border of Eriador, that in the Years of the Trees and the First Age served as the border between Eriador and Beleriand. It was also known as the Ered Lindon, the Mountains of the Land of the Singers, Lindon being a name given to the region of the Ossiriand by the Ñoldor, derived from the Nandorin Lindānā.  
>  **Falathrim** —‘People of the foaming shore’ (Sindarin) or ‘Coast people’ (Sindarin); the Sindar of the Havens of the Falas in Beleriand; Círdan’s people.  
>  **Hithaeglir** —the Misty Mountains (Sindarin); the mountain range separating Eriador and Rhovanion, the largest mountain range in Middle-Earth; first raised by Morgoth to hinder Oromë in his hunting of Morgoth’s creatures  
>  **Iathrim** —the Sindar of Doriath  
>  **Ithil** —the Sindarin name for the Moon; of the Sun and the Moon, it is the elder of the two vessels, lit by Telperion’s last flower; in an early version of ‘Of the Sun and Moon and the Hiding of Valinor’ was said to be “the giver of visions” ( _The Lost Road_ 264). As this form is very similar to ‘Isil’, the Quenya form (which is likely to be its original form, as the vessel of the Moon was made in Aman), it is likely that ‘Ithil’ was adapted from ‘Isil’; all I can suppose is that the Valar got in contact with Melian at some point during the First Age to share information.  
>  **Lisgardh** —A marshy region by the Mouths of Sirion, a land of reeds that grow man-high and dense as a forest. Its name in earlier drafts was ‘Arlisgion,’ translated in _The Book of Lost Tales 2_ as “the place of reeds” (155).  
>  **Rodyn** —Valar (singular: Rodon) (Sindarin): a common Sindarin name for the Valar


	2. Chapter Two

And here entered Elrond’s third problem, in the form of a man who stood several inches taller than him, had a smile that alternated between tangible sunshine and nearly-as-tangible moonshine, had a family legacy that followed him around like a blood-soaked war hound, and who nearly everyone who had been alive in the First Age and had taken any part in the wars did a double-take upon first seeing him. Not always a flattering double-take. Not always a friendly double-take, either.

Elrond… did not have much to do with Celebrimbor. Elrond had never had very much to do with Celebrimbor, and he had never had very much difficulty in not having much to do with Celebrimbor.

Though he had some basic knowledge, enough that he could have taken care of himself reasonably well in an unfamiliar city, Elrond did not have much expertise at blacksmithing. Celebrimbor, meanwhile, was easily the most prolific smith in Lindon, and now that Enerdhil had gone back over the Sea to Valinor, he was universally recognized as the most accomplished blacksmith among the Ñoldor, as well.

Elrond had no great love of combat, but he had grown up in turbulent times (that were especially turbulent for him and for Elros), and he had no desire to be caught flat-footed if the need for combat came upon him, so he did spend a fair amount of time every day in the training grounds. But Celebrimbor kept different hours than him, and from what Elrond had gathered, Celebrimbor had even less love for combat than he did—the man forged weapons that served the mightiest warriors in the land very well, but he was considerably less likely to be found wielding those weapons himself. (And there were those who muttered that Celebrimbor ought not to be allowed to bear any weapons at all.)

They were both highly enamored of the library and archives of Lindon—Celebrimbor had a well-traveled reputation as a devoted reader of books, and some of the translations bore his name as the name of the translator. At times, Elrond had found himself moving carefully through the library in the royal court, keeping a weathered eye out for this distant cousin of his (Not so distant depending on how you looked at it, not so distant depending on who you _asked_ , but Elrond had _not_ asked, Elrond did not wish to have it regarded in such a matter and he did _not_ wish to have a conversation about it, with _anyone_ ). But Celebrimbor did indeed keep different hours than Elrond, and so long as Elrond did not come to the library during the hours when even someone as married to his work as was Celebrimbor considered the forge too hellishly hot to work in, there was little chance that he would encounter Celebrimbor there. Elrond made a point of only going to the library during those hours on business. If he encountered Celebrimbor, he could claim, truthfully, that he was there on business and he had no time to chat.

And Celebrimbor did want to chat. With Elrond in particular, he very much wanted to chat. Elrond thought he might have more sympathy for that desire had Celebrimbor wanted to talk about _anything_ other than what he did. Celebrimbor’s social circle at court was… It was not the widest. He rarely emerged from the forge, these days, and the only people who went there looking for him were Gil-galad, Galadriel, and Celeborn. He had been absent from the last feast, pleading an approaching project deadline as an excuse, but it was a flimsy excuse and everyone who heard it could guess what was actually lurking behind it.

Truly, Elrond thought he would have been more sympathetic if Celebrimbor wanted to talk about literally _anything_ other than what he always wanted to talk about, when it came to Elrond. But for Celebrimbor, when it came to Elrond, there seemed to be only one topic of interest. Just the one. And it was not one Elrond wished to speak of.

And now, this.

Now, this.

Summers in the Ered Luin could get blisteringly hot on bad days, and were not the kindest for horses, even those being driven along at relatively gentle paces. Elrond’s learning in healing craft was prioritized for the Edhil and for Men—he was no expert when it came to animals, and did not wish to risk causing harm to the horses if he could avoid it. Thus, they were leaving in the small hours. Anor had yet to crest the peaks of the mountains as Elrond made his way to the stables, pack slung over one shoulder. There were few awake at such an hour—the guards he passed had a look of having barely woken up, and Elrond struggled to push down a memory of a person who would have stopped and asked them if they had gotten enough sleep the night before, if their provisions were to their satisfaction—and Elrond enjoyed the solitude that was his as he made the walk from his quarters to the stable. It was, after all, the last solitude he would have until he made his way back here again.

And his solitude ended the moment he entered the stables, for he found it already occupied, and not just by the grooms.

Anor had yet to show her face to the world west of the Ered Luin, but Gil-galad’s hair had already been turned to brilliant gold by the delicate pre-dawn light. The moment Elrond stepped into the bounds of the stables, Gil-galad caught his eye, and made his way over to him.

Slapping a hand on Elrond’s back and leaning down so that his mouth was close to Elrond’s ear, Gil-galad muttered, “Do keep in mind that I don’t expect you to carry all of the treasures of Himring down off of the island on your backs. Take a catalogue, take a few small items if you deem them to be of immediate concern, and then wait for the ship to come back for you.”

Yes, they had gone over the particulars yesterday, after Elrond had swallowed each and every one of his reservations regarding his traveling companion, one after the other. Three days they were to spend on Himring, and as far as Elrond was concerned, it was not nearly enough. The fortress was massive; how was he to see everything that there was to see, learn everything there was to learn, in just three days?

But Gil-galad would not be budged, and thus, it was to be three days. Perhaps, if he felt that what information Elrond managed to gather in that time period justified further expeditions, Elrond would then take part in those expeditions, and he would have more time to spend on Tol Himling, in the fortress of Himring-that-was. It would not be what Elrond wanted. It would be harder to find solitude in the midst of those expeditions, harder to find moments when it was just him, and all the things he could learn, for then there would be more people, people who were there to carry the treasures of Himring out, treasures that could be broken in the removal and rendered beyond studying. Such were the perils of being a loremaster, Elrond could only suppose. (Along with the threats of kidnapping, the threats of robbery or murder when you find yourself alone in a strange land, or the threat of having an allergic reaction to a flower you’re studying. Just the normal perils of being a loremaster. When you were a loremaster named Elrond.)

Perhaps Elrond would be able to get what it was he was wanting to get out of the journey in the three days spent in Himring. Perhaps three days would be enough for him to understand, fully understand, and then admit to himself that he understood, why it was that he had been so eager to take the assignment in the first place. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. For now, he was simply hopeful that what he learned in those three days would be enough to further his knowledge as a self-taught loremaster-in-training. He hoped that he learned nothing capable of making him want to turn off of the path he had chosen for himself.

“We’ll see if I can’t find something to impress you with,” Elrond said in reply, half promise and half challenge. “It was one of the greatest fortresses of the Eldar, in its time. There must be _something_ there.” There must be so much there, even if all that is there is broken and weathered stone. There must be so much there. There must be so much that Elrond could find that would speak to him.

(They had never told any stories of Himring. Not one, in all the time he and Elros had been with them. Elrond knew more of what he was seeking for than did any young Edhil who had never known anything but a world where an entire continent was shattered and drowned, but for stray bits of bone that peeked their heads above the water. The idea exhilarated him. It also left his insides prickling with trepidation.)

“And we’ll see if you can swallow down your disappointment if you find the fortress was already picked clean long before we ever reached it.” But Gil-galad’s tone was light enough. “Just…” He paused, frowning. Again, Elrond could not begin to guess just what that frown was supposed to signify, and in times to come, he would wish he was more intimately acquainted with the particulars of his king’s face. Having an idea of what that frown was meant to signify would have been useful. “Just be mindful, when you are there. The land was strong, but that was in the days when Maedhros ruled there. Much may have changed when the land around it was drowned.” He pressed his hands to Elrond’s shoulders, staring long and hard into Elrond’s face. “Be careful.”

Still laboring in ignorance, both of Gil-galad’s frowns and of just what was going through Gil-galad’s mind, Elrond nodded, only slightly uncomfortable. “I won’t walk off of a cliff, if that is what you are fearful of.”

It was just because he didn’t want the Sindar to turn any harm that might come to Elrond into a cause for quarreling. It was just an overabundance of caution on Gil-galad’s part. It was just because of the regard Gil-galad showed towards Elrond’s safety on a personal level. Elrond did not read anything more into it than that.

Gil-galad rolled his eyes, and began to steer him away from where they had been talking. “I see you are in good spirits. Come on. I’ve already told Celebrimbor what I told you of the particulars. All that’s left is to say our farewells.”

Elrond tried to smile as they made their way over to where Celebrimbor and Celeborn were holding a hushed conversation in the shadow of the stable. He would like to think he could have at least managed a wry smile, considering that the conversation Celebrimbor and Celeborn were having seemed to be, from what little Elrond could make out of it, a mirror of the conversation he and Gil-galad had been having just now.

“—certain you’re up to this?” Celeborn was asking, peering into Celebrimbor’s face with an expression of intense concern written into the tight line of his jaw.

Celebrimbor, for his part, blinked blankly back, though given the barely-evident stiffening of his back, Elrond could guess that this was not the first time they were having such a conversation. Given that it was Celeborn, and given the way Celeborn seemed to regard Celebrimbor, Elrond supposed it would be safe money to assume that this was absolutely _not_ the first time they were having this conversation. Nor the second. Possibly not even the third, depending on what time of day yesterday Celeborn had found out that Celebrimbor was going on this assignment. “Celeborn, I spent many years of my life within the bounds of that fortress. It holds no secrets for me.” Dropping his voice, he added gently, “I think I am among the most qualified here to make such an expedition. I will be in no danger there.”

“That’s not what I _meant_ ,” Celeborn grumbled, scrubbing his brow with one hand. “And it’s been _decades_ since you were last there, anyways. You’re not going to find it as you remember; you may not find _anything_ you remember. It doesn’t pay to be flippant.”

Still markedly unconcerned (his back stiffening a little more), Celebrimbor sought to reassure him, saying, “My uncle built the fortress to withstand all the assaults of Angband. I doubt anything the weather or the Sea has had to throw at it would be enough to destroy it, if Angband couldn’t.”

Exasperated temper darkened the usually fair, mild cast of Celeborn’s face. “Yes, because _that’s_ what Maedhros is best known-for: building impregnable fortresses.”

Celebrimbor’s back went ramrod-straight, so visibly strained that anyone looking at him would be forgiven for assuming they were about to hear something snap. Elrond set his jaw, resisting the urge to grind his teeth as he braced himself for any further _mentions_.

But it was not to be. Celeborn’s gaze drifted over to Elrond and Gil-galad and the flash of temper vanished off of his face, though the concern was still entirely intact. Gil-galad, meanwhile, seemed to have decided that _someone_ needed to do _something_ about the way the air had suddenly grown so tense and charged that the mere presence of a flint stone might have been enough to set the air on fire, and cleared his throat.

“Celebrimbor, good morning. No trouble gathering provisions?”

Celebrimbor favored Gil-galad with a small smile that nevertheless looked to Elrond as though he had cut out a sliver of sunlight and fitted it in his mouth. “Good morning, and no, none. I am well-acquainted with your steward; she provided me everything I needed.” His pale eyes, bright, piercing eyes, settled on Elrond’s face, and Elrond stiffened slightly, now finding himself resisting the urge to fiddle with his sleeve cuff. But Celebrimbor was not so socially gauche as all that, and if he had questions, if he planned to try and start up the same strain of conversation he almost always did when he spoke to Elrond, he was likely saving it for when they were riding alone up the northern road. “Elrond.” He sounded… He sounded pleased, and Elrond wished he could say the same. He wished for so many things. “No trouble for you, either?”

“No.” Elrond did not try to force a smile onto his face; he remembered past attempts of such things well enough to guess what sort of impact a forced smile would have on those looking at him now. “No trouble at all.” He looked awkwardly at the eastern sky, which kept on lightening, Anor’s progress over the sky as inexorable as it ever had been. “Shall we be going? The day won’t wait for us, and I’d like to avoid taxing the horses while it’s too hot.”

The journey from here to the small port where their ship was waiting would take, Elrond had projected, five days. Six, if the weather was not fair. It could take four if they drove the horses hard, but he did not intend to drive the horses hard. The ship was scheduled to take them to their destination seven days from now. Really, they did _not_ have to leave right now. Gil-galad would certainly have let them pause for a leisurely breakfast, at least. But the idea had taken root in Elrond’s head, and now that it had taken root, he knew of no way to pull it out: the sooner they left here, the sooner they would get _there_.

As Elrond was mounting his horse, he heard, not really meaning to, the last of what Celeborn had to say to Celebrimbor.

“I am sorry,” Celeborn murmured. “I do not mean to…” He broke off, sighing. “Well, you know.”

“Yes,” Celebrimbor said, very quietly, “I do.”

“Oh, don’t look at me like that.” For a moment, Elrond considered looking over his shoulder, the better to see exactly what sort of face Celebrimbor could possibly be making to provoke such a defensive tone. “Just… Be careful. That fortress is a relic of things I sometimes think we would all be better off forgetting.”

“I’m always careful, Celeborn,” Celebrimbor retorted with a light laugh.

“And you’re a wretched liar, as well.”

“And _I’m_ not better off forgetting all of it,” Celebrimbor went on, considerably more firmly. “If I forgot it all, I would forget myself.” He sighed. “I…” Voice dropping down to a mutter, something more of night and things muffled by storms than something that really fit in with the delicate tendrils of light now snaking across the ground outside of the stables, he said, “It’s not something you can escape from. It’s _not,_ Celeborn,” and Elrond could only guess what sort of face Celeborn had made to provoke such a hardening in Celebrimbor’s voice. “Maybe someday, things will be different. But not right now. I can’t escape it right now. If I try to, if I try to tear myself away from…”

Elrond bit down so hard on his tongue that within moments, he was tasting blood.

After a long pause, Celebrimbor sucked in a long, harsh breath. “Forgive me. My temper has overcome my manners.” Voice low and even but markedly brittle, “Thank you for your concern, Celeborn, but excepting any true cataclysm, we should have no trouble.”

There came a rustling noise that Elrond could not for the life of him place, and never had he desired anything less than did he desire to turn around and look. “And what about the trouble that you bring yourselves?”

Whatever trouble they might bring themselves, Elrond thought, he doubted any of it would compare to the trouble that had already plagued the land. Whatever trouble they might bring themselves, it was nothing compared to the trouble that had turned a fortress on a tall hill surrounded by many, lower hills, into an island rising out of the Sea. People of their capacities could never bring down that sort of trouble.

No, what trouble they might find was quieter, and would wreak havoc only upon themselves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Anor** —the Sindarin name for the Sun  
>  **Edhil** —Elves (singular: Edhel) (Sindarin)  
>  **Eldar** —‘People of the Stars’ (Quenya); a name first given to the Elves by Oromë when he found them by Cuiviénen, but later came to refer only to those who answered the summons to Aman and set out on the March, with those who chose to remain by Cuiviénen coming to be known as the Avari; the Eldar were composed of these groups: the Vanyar, Ñoldor (those among them who chose to go to Aman), and the Teleri (including their divisions: the Lindar, Falmari, Sindar and Nandor).  
>  **Ered Luin** —“The Blue Mountains” (Sindarin); the mountain range at the far western border of Eriador, that in the Years of the Trees and the First Age served as the border between Eriador and Beleriand. It was also known as the Ered Lindon, the Mountains of the Land of the Singers, Lindon being a name given to the region of the Ossiriand by the Ñoldor, derived from the Nandorin Lindānā.


	3. Chapter Three

Dawn stretched rosy, incandescent fingers across the land as Elrond and Celebrimbor were off up the northern road. A gentle breeze came up from the Sea to greet them, taking some of the edge off of the heat, though Elrond could guess at the streams of sweat that would be making his shirt stick to his back by midday or so. His horse, a gray palfrey one of the grooms had named Rosehip (Elrond kept running into stables where all of the horses were named for flowers or herbs or fruit; he wasn’t complaining about it, but he was starting to wonder just how probable it was that _every_ stable he came across had at least a few horses in them that had been named thusly), had taken to the heat better than he had hoped. He wasn’t certain if the horse was originally from hotter climes, or if she was just more tolerant of heat than he had assumed a horse would be in the far north of the world, in a part of the far north that was suddenly experiencing much warmer weather than it once had. (Elrond wondered often if it was the sudden proximity of the Sea, or if it was the removal of Morgoth, who had no doubt taken perverse glee in manipulating the weather to make it as cold as possible at all times of the year, the better to edge farmers’ fields towards crop failures and communities towards starvation. It would have been interesting to study, except that he did not think that he would find too many people willing to agree to interviews, if he was honest about what he was interviewing them regarding.)

It had been a while since Elrond had had an opportunity to get out of the capital. Alright, so he had had spare time; Gil-galad did not work him so hard that he could not have gone out into the countryside for the day every once in a while. A few weeks ago, a shipment of books from the far south and east had arrived—annals of lore from Avari who had made their lives alongside the Men of those lands. It was an opportunity for study unlike any Elrond had had thus far, and thus he had spent every free moment that was his once the archivists had agreed to grant him permission in the place where those books were being kept, reading every last word. That had been slow going, since the dialect used was one Elrond only had basic familiarity with, but the person working on translating the texts into the Iathrim Sindarin most commonly used at court had been more than willing to let Elrond sit by them and take a look at their notes. Occasionally, Elrond was persuaded to help with the translation, though this had required some hasty learning of previously barely-known dialects, and after that, dialect half-understood, the help he gave consisted primarily of the translator consulting him for a second pair of eyes when they were uncertain how exactly the original writer had meant to spell a certain word.

…Alright, so Gil-galad occasionally had to come find him in there when Elrond forgot to come down to the great hall for supper. Alright, so occasionally Gil-galad had sent someone in there when Ithil was rising high and the candles were burning low and Elrond had tried to make a bed of the table and a pillow of a book. A loremaster could not be someone who turned his nose up at knowledge, whatever that knowledge might be. A loremaster could not be someone who would shirk when the prospect of greater knowledge was presented to him. Frankly, Elrond thought that a loremaster could not be someone who would balk at the idea of giving up sleep in the name of greater knowledge. And no, there was no other reason why he might be avoiding his bed. No, there was no other reason as to why he was doing something other than sleeping when Ithil was high and the candles were burning low.

Elrond could have gone out into the countryside on several occasions these past several weeks, he knew. He’d not had time, quite frankly. There had been too much for him to do. There was too much for him to learn for him to turn his attention away from it to go out into the countryside, where he could not take these old and fragile books—the translator might well have been finding somewhere remote and untraveled to hide his broken body if he caused any of those books to come to harm by taking them out into the elements.

When Elrond thought of it, he thought he might have last been out in the countryside, just out in the countryside, sometime in early spring. Now, as then, he was traveling somewhere with a purpose, but he was traveling so leisurely that this might as well have been a pleasure trip. He was riding at a brisk amble, but Rosehip had yet to decide on her own that she wished to break into a gallop, Celebrimbor seemed just as content to maintain a pace that would not overtax the horses, and for the first time since early spring, Elrond got a good, long look at the surrounding countryside.

The Sea was a sparkling haze off to the west, down the steep hills that broken suddenly into cliffs, the narrow strip of land below between cliffs and Sea too freshly-wounded to have any of the soft sand or gentle inclines Elrond knew from childhood to expect of a true beach. (Things still washed up on the shore, on occasion. The last time Elrond had paid a visit to the beach, quite a while back, he had tripped over a skull, either of an Edhel or a Man—though if the purported origins of the Orcs was a true tale, he supposed it could also have been the skull of an Orc—half-buried in the sand. Elrond had not gone down to the Sea again since then. It had just occurred to him that this would be the first time he had gone to the water since that day. He… He had not thought about that, actually.) The Sea sang so very sweetly, and Elrond had watched its songs put a longing into the hearts of many Edhil in his time, but whatever song it sang, it did not sing for him. Whatever the designs of the Rodyn had in store, they were not done with him, yet. He did not know whether or not he found that comforting.

(Another reason to avoid the Sea: sometimes, the singing Elrond heard was not the hazy, indistinct, un-Edhil, and inhuman voices of the Sea. Sometimes, it was a voice that was distinctly of the Edhil, to hear it. So far off, and on the few occasions that he ever laid eyes upon the singer, the face of the singer was none that Elrond knew.

It was unwise to follow the voices he heard. He knew that. It was unwise to follow a strain of song carried to him on a breeze rippling so sweetly out of the south. Unwise on so many different levels: he could not be away from the capital and his duties there for too long, he could not go chasing what could very easily have been a ghost down the shore, could not justify it in his mind, could not justify it in his heart, could not begin to think of how he would have justified his longing to literally anyone other than himself—even Elros, he thought, would have stared at him in disbelief when he learned what his brother had been doing—could not think of how he would have held his heart together if he had followed the song to its source and found the singer, could not begin to _fathom_ how he would have lived if he had followed the song to its source and found nothing at all…

Elrond did not go to the Sea, not for anything that was not business. And when he was by the Sea, he did not listen to any song that might be sung in his hearing. They were not for him. None of them were for him. None of them could be for him.)

So Elrond’s gaze did not linger too long on the sparkling haze of the Sea in the west. Instead, he turned his gaze east, towards the rolling foothills, in these last few decades much abbreviated, of the Ered Luin.

It was a rich, verdant summer this year, the earth painted in lush, vivid shades of jade and malachite and emerald. (Sometimes, Elrond surprised himself with these little flashes of Ñoldorin thought. He had never been particularly inclined towards jewels or the art that could be made with them, but sometimes, he looked at things like this and thought of how it would look as a mosaic constructed of gems and painted stone. Those little flashes of thought never sat particularly easily in his mind. Quenya sat easily in his mind. It flowed from his tongue as smoothly as any dialect of Sindarin he had ever spoken, at least when Elrond did not think about _what_ he was saying, or why—if he did, the tongue no longer sat so smoothly on his tongue after all, so, quite frankly, Quenya might not have sat so well on his tongue as he tried to tell himself. The epics of the Ñoldor sat easily in his mind. The pursuit of knowledge did not sit easily in his mind so much as it encompassed his mind—very easily. But this, this did not sit so easily. Jewels never sat easy.) The sky matched the earth in terms of vivid shade, and this time, Elrond was able to reach for something that was now a jewel shade, for he looked at the sky and saw a pale, soaring azure untouched by any cloud. The mountains carved up the sky like bits cut off of a roast; they stretched their long, old, blunted limbs, mottled gray and brown and snow-capped white, towards the sky in supplication or longing or some other emotion that Elrond had no name for, an emotion known only to mountains. (He’d heard tales of some of the mountains of the Hithaeglir, and their moods. He was _not_ going to discount mountains having emotions out of hand. That would have been beyond foolish.)

The air was sweet with the scents of leaves and sea-salt (he was trying to ignore it) and the perfumes of thousands upon thousands of flowers. There were few flowers growing right by the well-trodden road, at least compared to what Elrond had seen growing in the meadows off of the road in years past, but he did spy columbine in shades of scarlet and blue and white-fringed gold growing not far from the road. Their spurred petals fluttered in the breeze like the wings of birds startled by the distant cry of a hawk. Thistles stood tall and proud and thorny, almost defiantly inhospitable in a world that seemed markedly inviting for anyone who wished to find a soft bed of grass for a nap. Off in the forest set back from the road on the eastern side, Elrond caught glints of purplish-blue that might belong to bluebells, though it was rather late in the year for them. Well, if he was journeying to the Sea, risking hearing the songs he could not follow, and in the company of someone who might yet go delving for scars he could open and scabs he could rip off too soon (it had been decades; it had been decades, and yet they still felt like scabs, still felt like something that could bloom bright beads of blood if he let anything chafe against them, if he let anything _touch_ them, and sometimes he wondered when it would stop, when it would all go numb and he could go about his life without being wary of them, and sometimes Elrond would nurse them and dwell over them and wish to never be numb of them), at least the setting was a pleasant one.

A flash of dull, brownish-red caught Elrond’s eye, and the rest of his gaze was drawn inexorably to where Celebrimbor was riding, a little ways ahead of him. Oh, Elrond was in no danger of losing him on the road; Celebrimbor wasn’t pushing his horse any harder than Elrond was pushing his. But this was convenient enough. Celebrimbor wasn’t likely to crane his neck for too long staring back at Elrond, and Elrond had a good vantage point from which to watch him. Just… just watch.

And then, Celebrimbor did turn his head backward, perhaps sensing Elrond’s thoughts. His eyes crinkled in a smile, pale and bright in his warm, tawny face, though the intensity of the smile did not quite match between his eyes and his lips. They never did, not really. “I may not be much of a traveling partner for this morning. I’m afraid I haven’t had much occasion to leave the capital these past few weeks; it’s been a while since…”

He trailed off, and Elrond nodded. He understood, or he thought he did. The story was a familiar one to him, at least.

The familiarity of it would rub vexingly against his skin for some time to come. Not grating, not quite. Not painful, not quite. But the discomfort of it would always remain just great enough for him to notice it.

-0-0-0-

A few hours later, they were giving the horses a rest in one of the meadows a few dozen feet off of the road. The grooms might think the horses a little indolent and fat by the time they returned to the capital and the horses returned to their stables, but the extra weight could be exercised off of them, and Elrond had seen more than enough scrawny, dull-eyed horses in his life—he wasn’t going to create any more, not if he could avoid it. While the horses ate the sweet grass and abundant clover, too well-trained and too content to even consider running off and leaving their riders here, said riders also took the opportunity to take their noontide meal.

Ah, travel rations. Elrond had hated these when he was a child. Back then, they were often stale, always meager, and sometimes only barely recognizable as something that could actually be called ‘food.’ He and Elros had often compared the little packs of rations they had been given for their own, trying to see if there was something, _anything_ , in the other’s packs that they thought they might like to have for their own meal, and finding nothing in particular. The closest Elrond had come to actually _enjoying_ a meal of travel rations was when he was thirty-two and he had found two strips of smoked fish that were only moderately dry, rather than bone-dry, and only tasted _somewhat_ old, as opposed to terribly, _severely_ old.

The pack of travel rations Elrond had unwrapped today was markedly unlike the packs of travel rations he had so often eaten from as a child, during those times where there had actually _been_ time for someone to prepare packs of travel rations, and there had been enough preserved food available to set aside for those packs. The pack Elrond had opened up contained a thick slice of salted pork, two strips of hardtack smelling strongly of rosemary, a chunk of hard, orange cheese, and a small collection of dried apple slices and raisins wrapped in a length of rough, white cloth.

It was indeed markedly different from the travel rations Elrond had eaten as a child. He had little doubt that, at the very least, he wasn’t going to have to scrape mold off of anything he ate on this journey, unless the food at the inn they were going to be staying at in the port was especially questionable. Anyone looking at these travel rations would have agreed that they were objectively superior to the travel rations he had eaten as a child, even if only because there was actually enough for him to eat to sate his hunger.

The travel rations were markedly different than the ones Elrond had eaten as a child, and he hated them on sight. There was nothing the preparer of this pack of travel rations could ever have done that would have made him _not_ hate it on sight. Elrond hated the food on sight the way he hated all dried, smoked, salted, or otherwise preserved foods; winter was not a pleasant time for him, where food was concerned. He bit into preserved food and his mind was transported backwards to times when the earth shook beneath his feet and when he did not have preserved food (preserved and too long gone without eating) he had no food at all beyond what he could find in the failing forests. His mind was transported backwards, and many things that accompanied that ever-present claw of hunger in his belly were fresh once more.

Well, it was summer, and this land was not failing, and Elrond had carried certain lessons away from his childhood with him.

Elrond spared a glance at Celebrimbor. His traveling companion had a graphite stick in one hand and a half-eaten pickled egg in the other; while he ate, he sketched one of the flowers growing in the meadow, a particularly large and pink specimen of clover. Celebrimbor was far more raptly absorbed in his sketching than his eating, and both occupied him enough that Elrond did not think that Celebrimbor would miss him if he took off into the woods for a few minutes, looking for something fresh that he could eat. And he wouldn’t go so far that he couldn’t hear Celebrimbor calling for him. Elrond had learned early on the folly of going so far that no one could hear you if you needed help.

In the days when this was not the relatively narrow strip of land between the mountains and the sea, but the far eastern edge of a coastal continent, this part of Lindon had been closely tended to by the Laegrim. They had had centuries to turn the forests of Ossiriand into their own personal gardens, and though Forlindon was these days largely depopulated of Laegrim (what few Laegrim had decided against going east over the mountains were largely concentrated in Harlindon, south of the gulf, where the weather was milder), they had tended their forests very well, once upon a time, and the plants and bushes they had nursed and cultivated would endure for as long as the climate allowed. More than once in their youth, Elrond and Elros had come across an abandoned garden in Harlindon—though the land had been failing in those days thanks to the twin influences of Morgoth and the Rodyn and the pickings had more often than not been poor, when he and his brother could find them, the old gardens yielded up more food, better-tasting food, than they would otherwise have been able to eat.

There would be no walls. At least, Elrond had never known any of the abandoned gardens in Harlindon to have walls. Elrond didn’t know quite how the Laegrim had managed to keep deer and rabbits and other interlopers out of the gardens, but apparently they had managed well enough to never feel the need to put up walls. Perhaps the Laegrim of northern Ossiriand, ‘enjoying’ (for a certain value of ‘enjoying’) closer proximity to Angband and to the Hadhodrim whom the Laegrim had _never_ trusted, not even before the business with Thingol getting into a row with a group of Hadhodrim craftsmen that ended with a _lot_ of people dead, including Thingol himself, had felt the need for walls. Forlindon having been largely depopulated of Laegrim for quite a while now, Elrond suspected any garden walls he found would have been crumbling and green and fuzzy with moss.

So, any garden walls around here would have looked like boulders. Small boulders, perhaps, boulders with entirely too regular a shape to be natural boulders. It gave Elrond something to look for, if the normal rules did not apply here.

He ventured into the woods, under the shelter of fragrant, bristling cedar trees and slender beech trees and brawny poplars. The trees were not as thick here as they had been closer to the capital, and Elrond had some hope that that might be a signal. He’d never heard of Laegrim deliberately cutting down trees, but to take advantage of fires started by lightning strikes, to cultivate new trees in such a way as to ensure that they would grow in one direction and not another, to pull up tiny saplings before they could really take root in the earth? That wasn’t the same thing as cutting down a grown tree, now was it?

Elrond looked around, and soon he spotted something promising. Over in a patch of sunlight, there was a patch of tangled, thorny bushes.

As Elrond drew closer, he saw that his supposition had been correct: he had happened upon a patch of blackberry bushes. They were clearly well-entrenched; the bushes were dense and sprawling, with nothing growing up from the ground where they themselves stood. The leaves on the bushes were lustrous and clear of any rot or fungus, and the berries themselves were…

Well, it was too early in the summer for them to be ripe. Elrond had known that they wouldn’t be ripe from the moment he had spotted the blackberry bushes and guessed at what they were. He had heard from those who had traveled to or from the south that, in gentler climes, blackberry bushes could host ripe fruit at this time of year, but these were not those gentler climes, and the blackberries Elrond found were not the deep, shiny blue-black of ripe blackberries. Some of them were a pale, greenish-white, and he would give those a miss, along with the small berries painted a delicate pink—the lion’s share of the berries needed to be left on the bushes, anyways, so as to feed the birds who would spread the seeds and propagate more blackberry bushes.

There were no fully ripe berries that Elrond could see; perhaps there were some in the center of the tangle, but he wasn’t going in there to find out. But there were a good number of berries on the branches that were a nice, shiny red. They’d be sour, but they would also be _fresh_ , and would leave a better taste in his mouth than the raisins he had left in his pack of travel rations back in the meadow.

Now, to gather some…

“Oh, have you found blackberries?”

Elrond would maintain later that he had _not_ jumped when Celebrimbor’s voice sounded close to his ear. He had not expected Celebrimbor to follow him into the woods, but it wasn’t as if he’d forgotten that Celebrimbor was out here with him. He had not jumped, and any claim of Celebrimbor’s that he had was baseless slander. Elrond had started, and that was only natural. He’d not expected to hear Celebrimbor speaking; it was only natural to be startled. He’d not jumped.

Elrond, having started but not jumped, turned on Celebrimbor, frowning. “I thought you were sketching.”

Celebrimbor shrugged easily. “There are only so many angles from which you can sketch a clover flower. I saw you going off into the woods, and, well…” He shrugged once more. “I was curious. I am often curious.”

Yes, Celebrimbor’s curiosity had been well-marked. Elrond might not have spent much time in the man’s company, but he had certainly heard tell of this one trait. He had certainly been on the receiving end of this one trait. It was probably why he had been sketching the clover flower in the first place—and Elrond found the question of _why_ dangling on the edge of his tongue and swallowed down upon it with unseemly haste. Not now, not now. Asking questions invited questions, and he was not willing to countenance any question that might have cut against the skin while he was still seeking food that would not taste of salt or other preservatives on his tongue.

“If you wish for blackberries, I suggest you pick the red ones,” Elrond said instead. “You’ll find none ripe today, but the red berries won’t be as harsh on the tongue as the younger ones.”

This earned him a nod as easy as the shrugs had been. “Oh, I know how this game is played. Here—“ he took a pouch of cloth from his belt “—I have a sack we can use.”

Not much of a sack, if Elrond was being honest; looking at it, he thought it might fit thirty of the largest red berries, at most. But the day was yet in its prime and Elrond could make return trips, if he wasn’t satisfied when he was done with his share. And there was more than just that. There was something that was pricking at the edges of Elrond’s own curiosity, just moments after he had tried to swallow it down.

Well, it was no use. Elrond sighed under his breath as he started to pick blackberries that looked at least _somewhat_ close to being ripe. He’d already denied it once, and if he tried to deny it again, curiosity would just grow and grow within him, ballooning in size until there was no room in his mind for anything but his own inquisitiveness. He wouldn’t be able to hear himself think for all of the questions; they would raise an unbearable din in his mind. He’d gone through this song and dance a hundred, perhaps a thousand, times before. And in many of those times before, he had not been in a situation where it was possible to ask those questions. For whatever reason, and there had been many, many reasons, Elrond had not been able to ask the questions. He had to swallow down on his curiosity, even when his curiosity was great enough to choke him. Sometimes, he had felt as if he was choking.

But here, here there was a forest, and there was sunlight like water dripping off of the branches of a long-dead tree, a tree whose death had been the cause of so much sorrow. Here, there was a tangle of blackberry bushes, and the tart juice of a blackberry Elrond had popped into his mouth stinging on his lips. Here, there was the two of them, and if there had been any Laegrim living in this forest, Elrond thought that even the shiest of them would have come out of their hiding places by now, if only to tell Elrond and Celebrimbor to get off of their property and stop eating their blackberries.

No one to hear, no one to draw conclusions. And perhaps Celebrimbor would not follow the thread with questions of his own, or perhaps his questions would not be close enough to cut.

But the most important thing was that if Elrond did not ask the question now, it would nag at him for the rest of the day, and perhaps tomorrow as well.

So: “Have you had much experience of foraging?”

Celebrimbor had never struck Elrond as someone who had a real, driving passion for the outdoors. He had never struck Elrond as the sort of man who particularly enjoyed going camping, or enjoyed long travels without inns on the way. He had never seemed to Elrond the sort of man who loved nature as much as the Laegrim who had gone into the woods and then stubbornly refused to ever come out again did.

But then, Elrond had avoided getting to know Celebrimbor too well. He had avoided Celebrimbor and his questions, and now, he could no longer do either. Not feasibly. He looked at Celebrimbor out of the corner of his eye, at the smooth black braid falling halfway down his back, at his long, clever hands delicately plucking unripe blackberries from their clinging branches—it would have been interesting to know if he worked with such delicacy in the forge, or if his strength overcame delicacy and he bent the things he made to the shapes he wished with his strength, rather than with subtle will. His eyes lingered over the fine, sharp slope of his jaw, and the gentle, almost absent smile curling his lips that yet glimmered like sunshine. How did he _do_ that, anyways? How did he manage to smile so brightly, even when he was barely putting any effort into his smiles at all? How, exactly, did someone who was left only with the shattered wreckage of his former life manage to smile at all?

(That was, perhaps, something that lingered in the back of Elrond’s mind when he caught himself—but no, no. No, it did not do to linger on such things. It did not do to go through life without smiling. When you try to go through life without smiling, even the polite smiles that everyone knows are forced but choose to accept as natural anyhow, people take notice. People ask questions. People make assumptions, and Elrond did not know, most days, which was worse: the questions, or the assumptions people made without the decency to ask questions first. So Elrond smiled. He smiled, even when he did not feel like it, with the knowledge that, one day, he would not be able to tell the difference, as his main consolation.)

Celebrimbor had either no knowledge of what was passing through Elrond’s mind, or he had else chosen to ignore it. Elrond did not know him well enough to guess at the difference, and he could only hope that, if they were to spend this whole trip in each other’s company, he would by the end of it know Celebrimbor well enough to know when he was being polite, and when he was genuinely oblivious. “A great deal, yes.” He rolled a particularly plump blackberry in his hands, before deciding to forego the sack and pop it directly into his mouth. “Though mind you, the last time I foraged for my food was a _long_ time ago. Once we had our fortresses built, once our cities cut into the sky, there was little need for foraging any longer.” The smile faded from his face, just a little, a cloud passing over the face of Anor. “And when our cities and our fortresses were thrown down…” His free hand was now moving over a long, thorny branch that jutted out from the tangle. He pressed his thumb down so hard upon one of the thorns that Elrond expected to see blood dripping from the tip when Celebrimbor at last drew his hand away. “Well, there was no time for such things,” Celebrimbor said quietly. “It was far more pressing a matter to reach safety.”

As familiar as Elrond had been with days that were hungry and hard and grayed-out with fear, he was familiar with days like _that_ , as well. War had come to all corners of Beleriand in its time—when giants did battle in lands meant for Edhil and for Men, it was inevitable that their destruction would touch all corners. Orcs and other monsters had roamed the land, and sometimes they had come in parties too large for the size of the force with which Elrond traveled to risk fighting. Sometimes, they had to run.

(Running was something that had not sat well with all parties concerned. As he had sped towards manhood, Elros had liked it less and less. It was not that he longed for death, or so Elrond hoped—though sometimes, these days, certain past events taken into account, Elrond had to wonder—but he knew his brother, and knew that his brother had felt helpless, and that fighting would have made him feel a little less helpless, and thus, Elrond had a good idea of why Elros had always spoiled for a fight, even when the odds were hopelessly against them.

_You did not expect his choice. You did not expect him to go away to be a king of a distant land and leave you on the ragged edge of your lost lands, staring out at the water and knowing that drowned beneath the waves are lands where you once walked, lands where you were born. You did not expect him to leave you for his new land, did not expect him to leave you to stare out at the water and know that where your birthplace was, now there is only water, and there is no proof for your existence but a life that could be snuffed out at any moment. Perhaps you did not know him as well as all that._

Elrond pushed that thought away.

What came up was barely any more pleasant.

There was another in their party who had taken to running from enemies with exceptional ill grace. Elrond had heard the stories, Elrond knew what he had been before the mountain had taken everything he was and spat back out something he had only been able to make ‘himself’ in time—or, at least, Elrond had heard stories. Stories were all that had been left, by then. Stories were all that had been left since long before Elrond was born.

Perhaps the man who had not yet been hung upon the mountain would have been able to both see the wisdom of retreat and bear it with good grace. Elrond could neither say nor guess, though he hoped he would have done; he had hoped for so many things, back then. The man whom Elrond had grown to manhood knowing was capable of seeing the wisdom. Barely. He was capable of bearing it with good grace, not at all. When they were pressed into retreat, his mood had grown black, his words petering out into silence, and the only one who would approach him in his black moods was the one who shared his blood.

There had been those who whispered that shared blood was no protection against those such as them—those whispers had come later, and Elrond had never heard them bandied about by those who were loyal enough to follow them all the way down into ruin, but certain aspects of the past blended together and time did not work as it ought in those cases—but Elrond had never been fearful of aught which might happen, when he watched them sit at the edge of the camp. He had never known quite what he was supposed to feel. All he could say was that his relief when Maedhros’s black mood finally dissipated and he would become he whom Elrond knew better once more was so palpable that he could taste it on his tongue.)

Sometimes, they had had to run. If Elrond was being very honest with himself, it had probably been a little more often than just ‘sometimes.’ For the first time, he was imagining Celebrimbor running, gentle Celebrimbor who had never in public had a hard word for anyone at court, even those who were not his friends and had never pretended to be such, and the image was not one that gave Elrond joy. Not so much as one bare shred of happiness.

But he had run, once. More than once, most likely. Elrond could guess at those circumstances; he had a general idea of where Celebrimbor had been and when during the First Age, though things got a bit fuzzy for a while after Curufin and Celegorm were expelled from Nargothrond. What he was more interested in, what he was determined to be more interested in, were the occasions when Celebrimbor had had the leisure to forage. Those occasions were more fertile ground for the imagination, and gentler ground for it as well.

Elrond had once been laughingly castigated for a curious little cat by a tipsy Thranduil, one night after a feast when Thranduil had mentioned teaching the Onodrim to speak and Elrond had so many questions that he had stumbled over them in his mouth. It was true; he’d not bothered to dispute the charge when Thranduil laid it. Instead, he had chosen to take the accusation and run with it, right then. Alright, so part of that was that he knew that Thranduil, true to his own nature, would drink so much that he likely would recall precisely none of what they had spoken of come the following morning. Another part of it was that Elrond knew he was far more likely to get information out of Thranduil when he was basking in the pleasant glow of mild drunkenness than when he was swimming through a mind impregnated with strong wine or keeping company with the throbbing, screaming headaches that came knocking once the glow was gone and the world reasserted itself. But he might have gone after the knowledge even if Thranduil had been sober and had had the wherewithal to tell Elrond to leave it until a time when they weren’t supposed to be celebrating… whatever it was they had been celebrating, Elrond forgot.

The point was, Elrond knew himself to pursue points to their logical conclusions, sometimes without much care for the appropriateness of either the time or the setting. He did not have that trouble today. Today, it was just him, Celebrimbor, and nature. They could speak as easily on horseback as they could here in the forest or in the meadow, and Elrond had for the moment forgotten the questions he feared to be asked, in favor the questions he burned to ask.

He did, at least, remember himself enough to know that he should tread at least somewhat lightly. Picking a few more red blackberries, he paused to eat a couple of them before glancing sideways at Celebrimbor and probing gingerly, “In Himlad? I imagine the town was not built in a day.”

But Celebrimbor shook his head, the sunlight catching on his dark hair and giving it an almost bronze cast. “No, not Himlad. My father wouldn’t let me join him and Celegorm there until all was finished; I stayed with Finrod until that day. And once I was grown, I had too many responsibilities, wherever I lived, to find time for foraging. I think we have enough blackberries for just now,” he said suddenly, gently jostling his little sack—if he was really so insistent on calling it a sack. “Shall we go back? Only, I don’t want to leave the horses for too long. They’re well-trained, but I don’t trust them not to try to make for the capital without us if we leave them be for long enough.”

“I—of course,” Elrond assented, uncertain of just how _else_ he was supposed to proceed, especially not when really, they did have enough blackberries to go with their meal—enough blackberries to be their _own_ meal, to be quite frank. Here was another disadvantage to having earlier gone out of his way to never get to know Celebrimbor very well: he wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.

Whatever Elrond was supposed to make of it, he was not certain Celebrimbor cared very much of what he _did_ make of it, for he had taken himself back towards the meadow, sack in hand, remarking, “We can speak more over our lunch. It’s not anything that will turn your stomach, I promise.”

Elrond rolled his eyes, in spite of himself. It was not very mature, but then, he was one of the younger members of the court, and though there had been some mutters about how one of Thingol’s bloodline, one of Thingol’s direct descendants, at that, should comport himself with greater dignity, no one had ever tried to _stop_ him, so… “That will be a novel experience, believe me. If you only knew some of the things I’ve had to research since coming here.”

This earned him a raucous laugh, not at all an unpleasant result; Elrond counted himself oddly pleased to have made Celebrimbor laugh in obvious surprise. “Tell me about it, sometime. When we’re not eating, of course. Even I can’t work on an empty stomach for too long, and trust me, I’ve tried.”

When they reached the meadow, each sat back down in the soft, sweet-smelling grass, Elrond no longer ignoring his pack of travel rations, much as he would have liked to. Celebrimbor had left his lunch half-finished, and he tucked back into it with markedly greater enthusiasm—a man who had not spent the majority of his childhood subsisting primarily on travel rations and whatever he could find in the woods, obviously, or, at least, it seemed obvious to Elrond.

In between bites of pickled egg, Celebrimbor waved a hand at Elrond, eyebrow raised. “Ask me again, Elrond. I promised I would answer.”

Odd as it was that he was prompting Elrond to ask him _again_ , when pausing the conversation had been his idea in the first place, Elrond wasn’t going to balk. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d run into a storyteller with some foibles, and this foible was pretty mild compared to some of the others he’d contended with. Taking one unenthusiastic nibble of rosemary-laced hardtack, washed down liberally with unripe blackberries, he pressed him, “When it is that you had occasion to go foraging for your food? If not in Himlad, then when?”

Celebrimbor smirked at him, though the effect was rather lessened by the half-mouthful of salted pork making his right cheek bulge. “I’m surprised you hadn’t thought of it yourself, Elrond. You’ve always seemed sharp enough to me that I thought you would have realized without my telling you.”

“We haven’t spoken _that_ often,” Elrond replied tartly. Perhaps they could change that, though. (He really had completely forgotten. He’d left his discomfort behind in the capital, and it would be several hours yet before it caught up to him.)

The smirk faded from Celebrimbor’s face. His gaze dropped down to his lap, to his large hands stained with blackberry juice. “No,” he murmured, “we haven’t.” Apparently no longer inclined to tease, he explained, “It was in Mithrim, Elrond. The land was better for farming than we had hoped it would be—at least, it was in the years when Morgoth wasn’t inclined to meddle with the weather and send unseasonable frosts, the years when Thangorodrim didn’t spew smoke and ash that poisoned the crops in their fields before they could be harvested—but in those first few years, we had so much else to contend with that there was little time for planting, not in quantities that could support the whole of the host. We survived on hunting and fishing, on our little garden plots, and we survived on foraging in the forests for whatever other food we could find.

“I was never allowed to forage unaccompanied. Part of that was due to my age. I was yet a very young child when we reached Beleriand, and my father was loath to let me go anywhere he thought might hold even the slightest element of danger; I—“ Celebrimbor paused, sucking in a deep breath; his eyes were suddenly bright beyond what was typical of the Lechind “—I was rarely alone as a child, though there were few other children in the camp with me.”

He was silent once more, for a long few moments, long enough that Elrond was beginning to regret having brought the subject up. That was the thing about him, wasn’t it? His curiosity, once aroused, was often insatiable, but not so insatiable as to make him insensible to regret when it became clear that he had trodden somewhere that might expose him to his conversation partner’s more… raw emotions. Elrond did not deal particularly well with such. He had no idea how to console them, no idea what to say that could ease the pain, and all he could do pat their elbow or their shoulder and then vacate the room upon being asked to do so.

Vacating would be… difficult, in this case. They still had to travel together, and it would be days before they reached the port and an inn where they could sleep in separate rooms. Until then, it would be riding together all day, and then sleeping by the same campfire at night.

Celebrimbor recovered. After scrubbing his hands on the grass (didn’t remove the blackberry juice, but did certainly succeed in smudging it on his skin, making it look as if he’d cut his hands on the thorns on the blackberry bushes), he sighed. “I never foraged unaccompanied. Celegorm was with me often, teaching me of the edible plants and roots to be found in the forests; my father and all of my uncles spent a great deal of time in the forest, and knew how to survive there, but Celegorm’s skill surpassed theirs, and he was the most natural choice for a teacher.

“If it wasn’t Celegorm, it was Huan, or perhaps the Ambarussa, or even Aredhel, once our camp and Fingolfin’s were on speaking terms once more, though she had enough to be getting on with, just trying to get Maedhros’s penmanship legible once more.”

The question of just what Celebrimbor had meant by that last point—it was a story that Elrond could guess at the edges of, but not one he had ever heard tell of—would have to wait for another opportunity. At the mention of the Ambarussa he had stilled, only half-listening to the rest of what Celebrimbor had to say.

He had heard of them, of course. The twins Amrod and Amras, youngest sons of Fëanor, who even among those who cleaved to Sindarin and disdained Quenya were often called the Ambarussa, if they weren’t being called something like ‘filthy Kinslayers’ instead. They were the last of Fëanor’s sons, but their infamy was no less salient for it. None of Fëanor’s sons had had their memory seep into the Second Age without the stink of infamy upon it.

There was… There were other reasons why Elrond knew of the Ambarussa. That their blood had watered the Lisgardh was not least among them. That he and Elros had been told stories by those who had so suddenly found themselves bereft of twin brothers was another. That he and his twin, small and young, black-haired and gray-eyed and pale-faced and looking so very, very like their mother, could not have looked anything like tall, grown, red-haired Amrod and Amras, did not seem to matter.

The images and memories that had been painted for them, more by one than by the other, had never fit properly into the tales left behind by all others whom Elrond had the opportunity to listen to. (Not that he had gone out of his way to collect these stories, not with any particular zeal. It had all been so close, _too_ close, really, for where there were tales of the two youngest, there were typically tales of the others following close behind.) They did not mesh, did not slot neatly into each other, did not slot into each other at _all_. They did not sound even like the same pair of men, but then, that was a statement Elrond had found to be typical of many things, regarding the First Age. The tales were gripping and the songs were beautiful, but even those relayed by those who had lived through the First Age in beleaguered Beleriand itself, sounded like something out of fantasy, sounded like nothing that had actually happened. The tales bore no resemblance to the reality of living through it. Nothing had ever been able to capture what it was to live through it, not without exposing some chink that caused the whole thing to fall to pieces upon closer inspection.

Then again, ‘falling to pieces’ was an apt description for the First Age. Especially for Beleriand. From the first day when Anor’s light touched the world, things were never going to end well. No matter how the Exiles might grapple with their great enemy, the hearts of the Valar were turned to stone against them, and they were doomed to failure. No matter how the fair lands of Beleriand promised a bright future for the Edhil and for Men, the land was always doomed to crumble and shatter and drown beneath the fathomless depths of the Sea.

Elrond could tell himself that the ruin had been inevitable. He found that that did not make the weight of it less burdensome upon his heart.

“We needed food,” Celebrimbor was saying, seemingly oblivious to Elrond’s own mental detour, “and I certainly needed the practice. But I was never allowed to search for food alone, not even as I gained greater knowledge of the sword and my height approached my father’s. I was _especially_ not allowed out into the forests at night, either accompanied or alone. The dangers of doing so were deemed far too great.”

The wind whispered through the grass, murmuring suggestions for questions and suggestions that pried at other emotions and other wants that Elrond never could find an outlet for, in all the long years that they had been his. There were many things he would rather think about than the Ambarussa, two men he had never met, two men whose swords he would likely sooner have been acquainted with than their gentleness or their good humor. There were many things Elrond would sooner have thought about than the dissonance between his memories of his childhood, the stories he had been told in his childhood, and the stories he had heard from others since his childhood had been excised with sudden violence. There were so many other things he would rather have thought about, and Celebrimbor had been obliging enough to give him something he could seize upon.

“What dangers, exactly?” Elrond swallowed the last of his raisins, thick and glutinous but by far the least offensive of the preserved foods that had been his lunch this day, before continuing, “There are few records of the first few years the Exiles spent by the shores of Lake Mithrim. I know that there are whispers of dangers to be found in the dense forests, especially those stretching north, but there is nothing I have found that can say for certain just what those dangers _were_.”

It was a gap in his knowledge, not something he had ever really appreciated. Even when he was a little child, and it had been a matter of his tutor—whoever that tutor might be, and there had been a _varied_ bunch—withholding a small bit of knowledge from him and Elros until they were considered old enough to contend with it properly, it had rankled. Life had not sheltered them, and thus, Elrond failed to understand why anyone trying to teach him anything should shelter him at all. He had survived everything that he had survived, and in the face of that, unpleasant knowledge had been frankly blasé.

(Until it wasn’t, until it was crushing him beneath its weight, but that was another strain of feeling for another time.)

Elrond understood that the Exiles and the Mithrim Sindar had perhaps had more important things to deal with during that time than painstakingly noting down every unpleasant thing that happened to them. Elrond understood that, on an objective level. On a rather less objective level, the inconvenience of it never failed to irritate Elrond, and though he had learned early on that the survivors of the events did not at all care for the expression of his irritation, he could hardly stop himself from _feeling_ it. Any opportunity for enlightenment would be seized.

And for whatever reason, Celebrimbor seemed more ready to speak of it than those others Elrond had tried to extract the information from. “You know of Thuringwethil and her ilk, do you not? The blood-drinkers? They haunted the forests in those days. I do not know if Morgoth sent them or if they came to harry us of their own accord. Besides Thuringwethil herself, they were creatures of hunger and impulse, with very little behind their hunger but for the base cunning of any predatory animal. I would not put it past them to have come down to give us trouble without having been ordered. I wonder sometimes just how easily Morgoth was able to control them; I do not think he could have persuaded them to do as he wished by either blandishment or threat.

“They did not take so many of our number, not in the grand scheme of things. I think that the Helcaraxë claimed many more of us than did the blood-drinkers. But they… they certainly made a mark upon us.” Celebrimbor glanced slyly Elrond’s way. “As I suspect you have already learned?”

Elrond snorted. “If by that you mean everyone I have attempted to speak to regarding the matter have been bull-headedly close-lipped,” he said sourly, “then _yes,_ I suppose it certainly did leave its mark upon the Exiles. Not a single one among them willing to speak of it before you, can you believe it? You’d think there would be at least _one_ who would want it written down, if only to have better stories to frighten their grandchildren with, but no…”

“Don’t be too hard on them.” Celebrimbor pressed his hand to the middle of Elrond’s back, between his shoulder blades, tilting his head down to get a better look at Elrond’s face. The thin, crooked smile on his mouth was not like sunshine, or moonshine, but there was a light to it that was visible even with the noontide light pouring down upon them. “It was hard on all of us, and I don’t think a single one of us came away from all of that without at least one thing we do not care to speak of.”

Perhaps that was true. Or perhaps it was not. There were times, oh, yes, there were times when Elrond did wish to speak of what many bloody shadows he carried with him. But even during those times, he could not find the words in his lungs, or he could not unstick them from the wet tissue, or he could not force them up his throat, or he could not dig them out of his tongue. The words were written into the interior of his body, and he could not force them out. They were part of him, and could not be part of the world. They instead burned and bled and screamed inside of him.

And for the most part, he did _not_ wish to speak of it. Sometimes he did, and he found that he could not. But most of the time, Elrond wished for the words trapped inside of his body to be nowhere but inside of his body.

This time, perhaps Celebrimbor could sense some of what was going on in Elrond’s head, for he rubbed his hand against Elrond’s back. His palm was large and firm, his touch still more delicate than Elrond would have expected from a smith who had to contend with stubborn materials all the day long, most days. It wasn’t something Elrond expected out in a meadow, miles away from the capital, miles away from any town or village.

As a matter of fact, it wasn’t something he expected back in court, either. Gil-galad touched him, but few others did. Galadriel wasn’t a tactile person. Thranduil was only tactile when drunk. Celeborn, he got the impression, did want to touch him sometimes, wanted to pat his arm or put an arm around his shoulder, but he always hesitated, as if he thought Elrond would be offended or spooked by it. Elrond could not guess if Celebrimbor was typically the sort of person to casually put his hand on someone else’s back, or if he was the sort of person who touched only to give comfort. Perhaps he would learn better in the coming days. Perhaps not.

“We all do,” Celebrimbor muttered. “We all step on each other’s toes and get on each other’s nerves. We don’t learn. We just don’t learn. But anyways…” He took his hand from Elrond’s back, letting it fall to the grass. “I spent a few years foraging for food in the forests; even after we got out fields going, it took a while for us to discover the best methods for large-scale farming, and there were some bad frosts that…” He smiled to himself, though it was a smile without much joy. “I had plenty of opportunity to forage for my food in the first several years by Lake Mithrim. Some of it was necessity, and some of it was because there are certain things you cannot grow in a field—mushrooms, for one, and more’s the pity. Foraging here brings up memories.”

And because Elrond could not seem to restrain himself right now: “What sort of memories is that?”

He didn’t even have parchment and pen out in front of him to document it all. Nothing with him to record it for posterity, except for his own memory. But then, Elrond knew exactly how keen his memory was. He’d had many occasions to rue how keen his memory was, but it had served him well during his own self-taught training; he could only hope it would serve him well again, now, on a trip where the only use he could have for his parchment was for taking the preliminary inventory of a long-abandoned fortress.

Celebrimbor ducked his head, a few locks of hair that had earlier fallen out of his braid slipping forward to obscure his face. “There are… There are a lot of abandoned gardens in Lindon. I noticed it a year or two after I first came to live here. There were abandoned gardens in Mithrim, too. Especially after the blood-drinkers first began to harry us, but even before that, when the sky was lit only by Ithil and we yet had the constant company of the stars.” He plucked up a stalk of grass, twisting it between its fingers until it broke. He continued to twist it even after the breaking, apparently oblivious to what he had already done. “I believe some of the Sindar had chanced the journey south, seeking shelter in Doriath.” His mouth bent with bitterness. “To Thingol, even relative proximity to Angband was enough to make his kin suspicious to him, but if those who shared his blood came to him crying for help, he would not turn them away. He was always loyal to his kin,” Celebrimbor muttered.

As Duileth was to hers. Elrond remembered the conversation he had had with Gil-galad. It was just yesterday; he was unlikely to forget. It was a trait shared by much of Thingol’s family, to be loyal to one’s own above all others. Elrond was of Thingol’s blood, as well, bore a thicker share of it than any other on the shores of Ennor, and his loyalties were to…

He was still trying to work that out. Slowly. The mind was reluctant to tread those spaces, reluctant to turn over the rocks and see what pale, squirming things lurked beneath, cringing away from light that would burn them and dry them out and kill them. Elrond was still trying to work out just what his loyalties would make him cleave to. It was going to be a slow process. Possibly he would still be at it when some cataclysm ushered in the Third Age of Anor.

“But surely, not all of the absences could be accounted for by the people fleeing south.” The words were out of Elrond’s mouth before he was entirely aware of them. He wasn’t certain which part of his mind they had come from, but they did not sit uneasily there. The idea just felt… right. Of course not all of the absent garden-owners had fled. Of course some of them, possibly most of them, had met rather different fates, different fates that explained why they were no longer present to attend to their garden plots. For it had been Beleriand, Beleriand in that time when Morgoth reigned in the north and monsters of all sorts haunted the dark and shadowed places. Elrond had never known any other kind of Beleriand.

“No,” Celebrimbor murmured. He let the shreds of grass in his hands fall into his lap. “Some of them no doubt died. And then, accompanied by my father, or by one of my uncles, or Huan, or Aredhel, or some poor, random guard, I would find an abandoned garden. The walls were crumbling, or scattered on the ground around the overgrown patches. I was always reluctant to go into them, even when the bushes or the vines were weighed practically all the way to the ground with fruit.” A nervous, rueful laugh struck the air like a hammer against a lump of raw iron. “The foolish whim of a child, perhaps, but I was always afraid I would be chased out by the owners’ ghosts. Even before the bloodletting began in earnest, Beleriand was a place I thought must be full of ghosts.”

An odd twisting was taking place on Elrond’s lips. Even he, with his mouth attached to his very own face, was not entirely certain exactly what sort of expressions his lips were trying to form. “Beleriand must be full of very watery ghosts now, then.”

Another laugh, this one wobbly rather than rueful, jarred from Celebrimbor’s mouth. “That’s quite the image; they must look like Uinen in all of her wrath.” Elrond could not see his face very well through the obscuring veil of those loose locks of hair, but he could discern a certain, apprehensive gleam in his pale eyes. “Well, I wish them joy of their waterlogged lands; I have never had _any_ joy of places where ghosts must gather.”

The words sparked something in Elrond’s mind, but they would not fully ignite until much later.

He wouldn’t think about it until much later. It wasn’t as if he did not have things to think of right _now_. For what Celebrimbor had said to him did speak to some deeply-buried, primal place in the recesses of Elrond’s mind.

Elrond had never thought to fear ghosts in the abandoned gardens he had foraged through as a child. Neither, he thought, had Elros. If Elros had feared it, surely Elrond would have heard something of it from him, either from the confidences shared by brothers who were the only children in a camp of those who were technically their enemies, however quickly they had ceased being Elrond and Elros’s enemies in anything but name. Ghosts had not been entirely foreign to Elrond’s imagination. He had grown up in times haunted by the idea of cataclysm and apocalypse; ghosts were a regular preoccupation for many of those around him.

Ghost stories had floated around the Lisgardh. Elrond could remember the barest snatches of them, primarily centering around mysterious lights in the reeds at night, lights that no one could reach and find the source of, no matter how they followed after them, lights that occasionally led those unwise enough to go chasing after them to disappear out of the sight of their fellows, for all time. Perhaps Elrond would have heard more, had he been allowed to grow to manhood in the shelter of the reeds, but such a fate had not been his.

His mother had grown to adulthood in the Lisgardh, though. Elwing had had decades in the questionable shelter of the reeds. She had had ghost stories, and there had probably been much need for foraging in a land that was many things, but most definitely _not_ good for farming.

Maybe they hadn’t let her forage. She was the sole heir of Dior Eluchíl, the queen of the Iathrim, and Elrond’s shadowy memories of him showed him a slight, small-statured woman—no doubt she had been an undersized child, once upon a time. But maybe respect (reverence) for rank had been put aside in the face of pragmatism, and Elwing had gone out into the reed forest to search for crabs or mussels or edible plants. Heavily chaperoned, of course; doubtless Thingol’s great-granddaughter would not have been allowed to go out into such a place alone, in the days that were Elwing’s as a child.

Elrond had never imagined his mother in such a position before. He’d never imagined his mother doing something that he, too, had done, not something so mundane. Closeness bloomed in his chest, and he got none of the petals of the flower—only its thorns. Oh, what an exalted bloodline was Elu Thingol’s, when the last two generations had scavenged whatever food they could find in the surrounding lands as children, and still gone hungry afterwards.

But those days were long behind Elrond, and though they felt as recent and as relevant as the rock that was currently digging into his left leg, he could try not to let it rule him. Anor shone bright and merry overhead, with nary a cloud to dull her face. Ghosts were not for sunlit meadows at noontide. This was not the sort of place where ghosts could ever rule.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Anor** —the Sindarin name for the Sun  
>  **Edhel** —Elf (plural: Edhil) (Sindarin)  
>  **Edhil** —Elves (singular: Edhel) (Sindarin)  
>  **Ennor** —Middle-Earth (Sindarin)  
>  **Ered Luin** —“The Blue Mountains” (Sindarin); the mountain range at the far western border of Eriador, that in the Years of the Trees and the First Age served as the border between Eriador and Beleriand. It was also known as the Ered Lindon, the Mountains of the Land of the Singers, Lindon being a name given to the region of the Ossiriand by the Ñoldor, derived from the Nandorin Lindānā.  
>  **Hadhodrim** —a Sindarin name for the Dwarves, ultimately adapted from the Khuzdul  
>  **Helcaraxë** —the Grinding Ice (Quenya); the bridge of ice between Araman and Middle-Earth in the far north of the world. Morgoth and Ungoliant escaped to Middle-Earth by this road after destroying the Two Trees. Later, after the burning of the ships at Losgar, the Noldorin exiles abandoned on the other side of the sea traveled to Middle-Earth by this road at great risk to themselves.  
>  **Hithaeglir** —the Misty Mountains (Sindarin); the mountain range separating Eriador and Rhovanion, the largest mountain range in Middle-Earth; first raised by Morgoth to hinder Oromë in his hunting of Morgoth’s creatures  
>  **Iathrim** —the Sindar of Doriath  
>  **Ithil** —the Sindarin name for the Moon; of the Sun and the Moon, it is the elder of the two vessels, lit by Telperion’s last flower; in an early version of ‘Of the Sun and Moon and the Hiding of Valinor’ was said to be “the giver of visions” ( _The Lost Road_ 264). As this form is very similar to ‘Isil’, the Quenya form (which is likely to be its original form, as the vessel of the Moon was made in Aman), it is likely that ‘Ithil’ was adapted from ‘Isil’; all I can suppose is that the Valar got in contact with Melian at some point during the First Age to share information.  
>  **Laegrim** —the Green-Elves of Ossiriand (singular: Laegel) (plural: Laegil; Laegrim is class-plural term); the division of the Nandor who followed Denethor, son of Lenwë; the name was imposed upon them by the Sindar, because of the lush forests of their land, because of their especial love for the forests and waters of their land, and because the Laegrim often dressed in green as camouflage  
>  **Lechind** —'Flame-eyed'; a name given to the Ñoldor by the Sindar, referring to the light of the Trees that shined in the eyes of those Ñoldor born in Aman during the Years of the Trees (singular: Lachend) (Sindarin)  
>  **Lisgardh** —A marshy region by the Mouths of Sirion, a land of reeds that grow man-high and dense as a forest. Its name in earlier drafts was ‘Arlisgion,’ translated in _The Book of Lost Tales 2_ as “the place of reeds” (155).  
>  **Onodrim** —the Sindarin name given to the Ents (Sindarin) (singular: Onod)  
>  **Rodyn** —Valar (singular: Rodon) (Sindarin): a common Sindarin name for the Valar


	4. Chapter Four

“Why did you volunteer to go to Himring?”

The rest of the day, once they had mounted their horses and returned to the road, had been passed in what Elrond considered a companionable silence, to be punctuated by the occasional comment about weather conditions or the state of a road that, as far as Celebrimbor was concerned, was not being serviced and repaired as often as it should. Elrond kept meaning to ask him why he had been sketching clover flowers in the first place, and every time the question came to his lips, he swallowed it down, choosing instead to enjoy the silence.

A warm, cloudless day had given way to a somewhat milder, but still warm, night, the stars obscured by no clouds, and Ithil rendered a slender sickle that gave off little light of his own. Between the stars and the campfire Elrond had set a little over half an hour ago, Ithil giving off little light was not much of an issue.

A bigger issue would have been the fact that Elrond was tucking into another meal of travel rations, and they had ridden so long into the evening that it was now too dark to go foraging in the woods (Elrond thought he could have taken on any bandits—he might have no true love of combat, but he had been taught by those whose skill was widely-acknowledged to be far and away above that of nearly everyone else you might encounter in Ennor, and he had learned and retained his lessons well—but you just didn’t go foraging in the dark, not unless you were absolutely desperate). Mind, Elrond was fond of hazelnuts, and there had been plenty of them in the package he had opened tonight, but that could not erase the disappointment of having to muddle through another meal of dry, heavily-preserved things that claimed to be food. Really, the port town with the inn could not come soon enough, if only so that Elrond could get some food that wasn’t so salty that the taste of salt lingered in his mouth even after a swig of water.

And now, at last, the question was being asked. Elrond had not expected it, though really, he should have. Later, he would turn it over and over in his mind, wondering how he could have overlooked it. Inevitably, the topic of conversation was going to turn to the assignment that had been put to them both. They could _hardly_ get all the way to Tol Himling without having ever spoken of it. There were plans that had to be laid, ideas that had to be cleared up, and Elrond had to discover from Celebrimbor exactly how they were going to get from the base of the island up the apparently nearly sheer hill to the fortress itself.

Elrond should have been expecting this. But as it was, it hit him like a bolt out of the blue.

Elrond set his pack of travel rations down on the ground, trying not to look at the food anymore. Honestly, he thought he would have liked it better if Celebrimbor had asked the question before he had started eating; his stomach had started roiling the moment he parsed the words in his mind, and the addition of food to it was not… Well, it was not what he would call helpful.

What to say, what to say?

“I’ve not had such an opportunity come to me in a while,” Elrond said carefully. Just as soon as he had put down his pack of rations, he found himself picking it back up, if only so he could have something to pick at and thus distract his twitching hands. “The last few assignments given to me only saw me going as far as the library, or the archives, or perhaps a day’s ride from the capital.”

“Ereinion isn’t too keen on letting you go off so far from the capital by yourself,” Celebrimbor volunteered. He eyed a half-eaten dried fig that had been part of his own supper, before clicking his tongue and flicking it into the fire. Elrond would have scolded him for the waste of food—the scold was already on his tongue—but this wasn’t the First Age anymore, and Celebrimbor was already speaking again. “He has this notion that if he lets you go off too far away by yourself, some ill will befall you and we’ll never see you again—“ Celebrimbor raised an eyebrow, peering closely into Elrond’s face “—or we’ll only see you after you’ve spent decades kidnapped by some traveling bandits.”

Elrond hunched his shoulders, uncaring of the fact that this must make him look very much like a moody adolescent; the darkness would obscure it, he hoped. Gil-galad, who as you can see gathers names the way a corpse gathers flies, had always supported him. He would acknowledge that. Certainly, he could not fail to acknowledge it, when Gil-galad’s support of him had been the one reason Elrond had an actual function in his court. Otherwise, Elrond suspected that his position would have been considerably more tenuous, and certainly more ambiguous: a Sindarin prince considered too young and too untried to rule over lands of his own, even those given to him as a fief, the blood of Elu Thingol but tainted by association with the Kinslayers, in a court ruled by the High King of the Ñoldor. In such a situation as that, Elrond could imagine his misery. With nothing constructive or productive to occupy his days, he doubted he would have lasted this long before doing something that would have cemented a reputation for himself as a complete pariah.

So, yes, Elrond had courtesy enough to be grateful to Gil-galad. He was courteous enough to be grateful, and all the more so because he _knew_ he had been allowed to act as a loremaster in the court, even one in training, because Gil-galad had listened to and taken seriously his desire to be of some use, to have an actual occupation. He was grateful, and he was grateful enough to feel like a churl to yet be chafing, but he didn’t feel like a churl badly enough to stop chafing against it.

He never could help his own emotions, could he? Elrond was ever-grateful for the gift of being able to keep others out of his mind; if they could see what was going through it at all hours, he doubted any of them would ever treat him quite the same way again. He could not help but chafe against Gil-galad’s reluctance to let him go too far from his side, though he knew exactly what had spawned it, knew exactly what protective impulses powered it. He still wanted greater freedoms than what were his.

This could be a good first step to that. If there was any way by which Elrond could _make_ it a good first step to greater freedom, he would grasp it in both hands. He needed this assignment to go well. He needed something he could bring back from Himring, something that would both justify future expeditions and prove that he was capable of ferreting out the forgotten secrets of a drowned land and a bygone Age.

And for all of that, he would need Celebrimbor’s cooperation. He would need Celebrimbor’s _help_. And for all of this, he could not afford to alienate Celebrimbor now. The idea of it was about as comfortable as sleeping with a knife pressed to his bare skin, but Elrond knew, he _knew_ that he would have to try and contend with Celebrimbor’s questions with courtesy. He could _try_ , at least.

Elrond’s stomach was still churning. His heartbeat was starting to pick up as well. He tried to calm himself, tried to keep the tension out of his voice as he spoke. “I truly despise the fact that that is the reputation I have gained in court—the one who gets kidnapped.” Alright, so that was perhaps not the best direction he could have struck out in. But at least, at _least_ , he wasn’t directing the sourness in his voice towards Celebrimbor himself. How could he? They had been little more than passing acquaintances in the capital; Elrond had no idea what sort of reputation Celebrimbor thought he had. He still had little idea of that. “To so many people there, I seem to be forever the child who was taken from the Lisgardh. I begin to wonder if I will ever be anything else in their eyes, or if after all of my accomplishments, after everything else I have done since then, I will still be the one who was kidnapped as a child.”

He did not want the pity. He did not want the whispers. He did not want the mutters of ‘divided loyalties,’ did not want to be regarded as either practically a Kinslayer by association, or as somehow ‘virtuous’ for having come away from the decades of captivity-turned-fosterage without being some sort of deranged killer. What he wanted…

Elrond did not know what he wanted, not exactly. Whatever it was that he truly wanted, it was something that sat in the shadows in the recesses of his mind, ponderous and obscured, many-eyed and many-armed and many-legged, refusing to be dragged into the light. Whatever it was, Elrond had little doubt that it would be infeasible. Whatever it was he wanted, he had _no_ doubt whatsoever that it would be impossible to fulfill without raising a drowned land from the depths of the Sea, without raising the dead from the Timeless Halls, without retrieving the disappeared out of the ether they vanished into. It was useless to contemplate what he truly wanted, when he could never fool himself into believing he would ever truly have it.

Elrond did not dare contemplate what it was he wanted above all other things, but you know, his life would be much easier if people would stop defining him as the child who had been kidnapped by the raiders who had sacked the refugee camp in the Lisgardh. His life would be much easier if those who surrounded him in the court would allow him to forge a reputation for himself that did not begin and end with something that had happened to him as a child. His reputation was built around passivity, and that was the worst of it: so long as his reputation was centered around passivity, Elrond suspected that the inertia holding his reputation where it was would be… considerable.

Truth be told, Elrond did not want a reputation as a treasure-hunter, either. He had known treasure-hunters, and he had never thought that their occupation brought them any joy. Indeed, as far as he could tell, their occupation had brought them nothing but grief. He could not have them anymore, and there were days when he wondered whether he should even _want_ them (days when the whispers of his fellows at court reached a little further under his skin than he would have liked, and Elrond wondered if there wasn’t something terribly wrong with him, after all, for not hating them with all of his heart), but he had learned some lessons there, and he would take this one with him for all time: do not put too much stock in treasure, for it will lead you astray.

Elrond did not wish for a reputation as a treasure-hunter, not a lasting one, at any rate. But if he could use it as a stepping stone away from his reputation as the kidnapped child, then at least this intermediate reputation would be good for _something_.

Celebrimbor sighed, so softly that Elrond thought it at first to be nothing but a breath of wind, but it was too close and had too much of a voice for that, and the flames of their campfire had quivered not a whit. When Elrond’s eyes found him in the gloom, he was staring down into that fire, his face a ghastly mask—not quite a death mask, but close enough to it that if Elrond ever saw Celebrimbor as a corpse, he thought he should know him as once.

He would never see Celebrimbor as a corpse. War was gone from the lands, Morgoth defeated and his servants, those who yet lived, scattered and weakened beyond any hope of recovery. And yet, the thought sat in Elrond’s mind, foreign and firm and unwilling to be dislodged.

Well, the Edhil could yet be slain by mischance. Elrond could not discount that. If Celebrimbor was ever slain by mischance, Elrond would know him at once.

“Give it time, Elrond,” he murmured. “Give it time. That is all I can tell you—well, that and that you should live your life in a way as to give the lie to it. It will take time—“ he smiled weakly, his smile a mere reflection of the firelight than something that put off light to rival it “—but I believe there is yet hope for you.”

Elrond looked at him, and swallowed hard. The thought of other reputations came to mind. Specifically, reputations came to mind when he looked at the man sitting across from him at the fire.

Yes, he supposed there was yet hope for him.

“You haven’t answered my question, Elrond.” Well, there was hope for Elrond regarding his reputation. Whether there was hope for him in any other respect was yet an open question. “Not in full, anyways. You gave me a reply—“ and here, Celebrimbor tilted his head, and the quality of the light that had made his face appear a death mask was extinguished as a thin, almost coy smirk stole over his mouth “—but not all replies are answers. I’m sure you’ve had many occasions to discover that since coming to stay in Lindon.”

“Many,” was out of Elrond’s mouth before he’d quite had time to think about whether this was the wisest thing to say, whether it was wise to speak at all, and thus give Celebrimbor extra ammunition.

“Oh, yes, many. Why do you think I spend so much time in my forge?” Elrond had had many assumptions for why Celebrimbor spent so much time in his forge, and honestly, very few of those assumptions had anything to do with the tendency of people in court to give replies without giving answers. “But really, Elrond. Why did you accept the assignment to go to Himring? I can’t imagine the fact that it gets you out of the capital is the _only_ reason.”

Elrond needed to stay in Celebrimbor’s good graces, at least as long as it took to get them to Tol Himling, and then back to the capital. Truth be told, he did not particularly want to be _out_ of Celebrimbor’s good graces. Though Elrond had avoided conversations with him that he had thought would cut too deeply into his skin, he had never been averse to the idea of speaking to Celebrimbor in general. If they could have found something else to speak of in the capital, if Celebrimbor had been willing to speak to him of anything else, Elrond would have obliged him, possibly even gladly.

He needed to stay in Celebrimbor’s good graces, _wanted_ to stay in Celebrimbor’s good graces, and so he would try to find something to say, something that did not burn or scratch at either of them. Whether Elrond could manage this was another matter.

“You… You can probably guess at much of it.” Elrond grimaced, trying not to grind his teeth overmuch. “After what I just told you of the reputation I’m trying to shake off, is it so strange that I would seize the opportunity with both hands? No one has been in Himring since the fortress was abandoned.” Celebrimbor flinched at that. Elrond did not fail to mark it, but he did not stop to think on it, not then. “You and I shall be the first. If we can bring down any of the treasure of the fortress, or even carry tales of it, there will be further expeditions, and my name will be associated with that, rather than the attack on the camp at the Mouths of the Sirion. Is that not enough?” Elrond asked of him, and wished on every star whose name he knew that he could have stripped out that small note of desperation clinging to the back of his voice before it ever hit the air, before Celebrimbor could ever hear it.

And perhaps he did not hear it. Or perhaps he did hear it, but Celebrimbor chose to take advantage of such things in different ways than Elrond might have expected. “It’s not all though, is it?” he asked softly. His gaze was gentle, no real force behind it, but as Celebrimbor looked at him, Elrond perceived his gaze as something with a force and a weight like a spearman thrusting their spear into the body of a foe. It had pinned him down; he could not turn away from it if he wanted to. “You’re not so impatient as all that—don’t try to protest otherwise, Elrond; I know the truth. The way the others think of you bothers you, but if you had not wanted this assignment for its own sake, I think you might have waited until another like it came to you. So why?”

There was something else clinging to the underside, something Elrond was afraid he had a name for. He thought he did have a name for it, and soon, so soon that the sudden, violent change in emotion set his churning stomach to a turmoil like nausea, that fear turned to anger.

He did not want to talk about it. He did not want to speak of it, not in company, not in front of a crowd, not to one single listener who kept pressing for the words, who kept presenting himself as a confidant and a sympathetic ear in spite of Elrond having _never_ asked for such a thing, never asked someone to make him vulnerable in such a way, never once expressed the desire—

(Sometimes, he caught the resemblance. Everyone said that Celebrimbor was the spitting image of Curufin, the spitting image of Fëanor. Elrond had never met either Curufin or Fëanor, and he could only begin to guess. Given the tone with which some named Celebrimbor the spitting image of his father and grandfather, Elrond had never entirely trusted this information not to be meant as some sort of slander.

Regardless of the motive, everyone who had the relevant experience named Celebrimbor the living image of his father, his grandfather, or both. But when Elrond looked at Celebrimbor, he saw an entirely different set of ghosts in his face. The glint of his pale, silvery eyes recalled another’s; the fine line of his jaw, even unscarred as it was, recalled another’s; his long, tapered fingers recalled another’s; his deep, pleasant speaking voice recalled another’s, and his gentle tone another’s. Elrond looked at Celebrimbor and saw not a single person so much as he saw a collection of traits that had once been the traits of others. He looked at Celebrimbor and he saw so much that he had seen before, and none of it felt _right_. Sometimes, he wondered how Celebrimbor could ever live with all of the ghosts that must be clamoring inside of him, showing themselves on his skin and no doubt struggling always to make their escape from his flesh.)

“My reasons are my own,” Elrond told him, in clipped tones that would convey his lack of enthusiasm for him, that _ought_ to convey how little enthusiasm he had for the subject. “Surely you, too, have your own reasons for having agreed to join me. I haven’t heard you tell me what _they_ are.”

All at once, everything in Celebrimbor’s face that had been open shut with a nearly-audible clang. His mouth was a perfectly even line, without the faintest trace of a smile or a frown to soften it. His brow was smooth of any lines that could have conveyed puzzlement or concern. His eyes were as flat as the rocks molded into skipping-stones by the ever-lapping waters of the Lhûn. Elrond had watched him go this way before, but he had never had occasion to be so close when it was happening. He had never had occasion to be the reason it was happening.

Elrond sucked in a breath. He did not easily let it back out.

“You may ask Gil-galad the reason, when we return,” Celebrimbor said at last, and his voice did not match his face at all. His voice was light, almost airily unconcerned, but when Elrond listened to it, he thought he could hear something heavier hiding behind it. “I doubt it would interest you now.”

Perhaps not, and Elrond could hardly lie and say that he wasn’t going to seize the opportunity to end the conversation with both hands. He nodded curtly to Celebrimbor, and turned away from the fire, lying down on the ground without bothering to finish off the contents of his pack of travel rations. The dark crept in from beyond the bounds of firelight, curled its fingers around his body, whispered at him to sleep and give his mind over to it. But as he shut his eyes, he could feel another set of eyes upon him, and he could feel curiosity stirring within him, ever-hungry, never satisfied, and uncaring of whether or not his heart was as curious as his head. He had a feeling he wouldn’t last the whole journey without it cracking through the walls of his teeth. Maybe he wouldn’t even make it all the way to the port.

-0-0-0-

The blood of Melian the Maia had, it was said, given strange gifts to her descendants. Everyone knew of Lúthien, likely the most famous child of the Edhil in all the world—there was no need to recount anew all of the powers that were hers alone, shared by no Edhel who lived before her, or has lived since her. And Elrond had listened to tales told of Elwing’s transformation into a great white bird many times now. (He would have sooner not had to hear it repeated in the court even once, but whether he preferred to have heard it from her lips, or he preferred to have never heard it at all, for there having been no flight away from the Lisgardh, no separation, no blood, Elrond did not know. It was tangled too tightly for Elrond to make sense of, and too closely bound to his heart to make any attempt to disentangle it anything short of agony.)

There were whispers of Dior, of the congress he had had with the beasts of the forest, of his gifts among nature being greater than any normal child of the Edhil, even the high Eldar, could have claimed. Nothing definite, and sometimes Elrond wondered if it hadn’t been manufactured, but still, the whispers were markedly consistent. Perhaps if they had lived long enough, Elrond’s uncles would have displayed gifts of their own, but it was not to be. They were as ambiguous a case as their father.

Lúthien, Dior, and Elwing all had their gifts, granted to them by the blood of their foremother. Elrond had no gifts like theirs—at least, none had manifested themselves, not as of yet. Perhaps he would turn out like his mother, and they never would, not unless he was put in a situation where the only alternative was death.

Well, Elrond _thought_ he had inherited none of Melian’s gifts. Nothing that mapped to what was reported of his mother, his grandfather, his great-grandmother. But there was one thing he had noticed, one thing that had followed him throughout his life, but had not come into sharp relief until he had come to live in Lindon, until he had lived in a place where it was typical for him to sleep within the shelter of halls, in a bed and under a roof. He wasn’t certain if there even _was_ anything to it, or if he was simply of this kind naturally, with his blood having nothing to do with it.

His dreams had always been vivid. Life had given him seemingly endless fodder for vivid dreams. When Elrond slept on the earth rather than in a bed, his dreams were…

Somehow, he always managed to forget, nowadays, until he was lying on the ground and cradled in the last hazy moments between the waking world and sleep, that when he slept on the earth, with nothing between himself and soil except perhaps a pallet or a cloak, that his dreams were entirely unlike the dreams he had in his bed.

Sleep found him quickly, just as it always did. Sleep found him quickly, and in the bowels of sleep, all that lurked in the back of his mind, locked away in wakefulness, broke their bonds and flooded the world with phantasms of light and sound and color and the sharp tang of blood, blood as it had once been imagined by a child who only known of blood from the stories told to him by various minders, blood that bore no resemblance to true blood whatsoever.

Elwing was there, but where her head should have been, there was a silver mirror affixed to the bleeding stump of her neck, reflecting his face back at him whenever he tried to search for any features of hers. It didn’t seem so strange at the time; he saw his mother’s face whenever he looked into a mirror, anyhow, so seeing his face in her mirror didn’t… It didn’t…

Elrond stared into the mirror, his eyes locked upon the fathomless depths of the glass. His face he saw reflected back at him, at least at first. He stared into his mother’s mirror and searched for her, and no matter whatever he saw, he never saw her. Bending his will upon a glimpse of Elwing’s face showed him nothing but shadow and sea foam, glittering with an array of stars trapped within.

And soon, the mirror decided to show him something else, something he’d not expected to find, something he had never thought to look for, something he did not wish to see, something he could not tear his eyes away from.

Elwing had seen many things in her time, and had doubtless seen many more after she and her sons had parted ways from each other. Elros was there, too. Elrond had not even realized it until he realized he could feel a hand in his own. That was strange. No, that was silly. His brother had always been by his side; they had clung to one another for as long as either of them could remember. There had been no reason to expect that Elros would not be here now, no reason to expect that Elros would be anywhere but at his side.

He looked at Elros, and saw his brother’s face reflected in the mirror affixed to the stump of Elros’s neck. His brother’s face was constant, there, and Elrond could have stared into it forever, but his mother’s mirror called to him, and his eyes were riveted upon it once more before he knew it.

The mirror showed him fire, showed him a burned and blackened hand clenched around a coal so bright that to stare at its light was as driving the tip of a knife into both of his eyes at once. The agony should have put him down on his knees, but it was instead something outside of him, something that pricked at his skin and promised future pain, but could never find a chink through which to seep inside.

The mirror showed him water, showed him the implacable, inexorable Sea, wrecking ships without mercy, drowning sailors without mercy. The mirror showed him the winds that blew from the West, blustering and battering against the drowned fortresses of the evil things that had once lurked in the north. The mirror showed him the earth, crumbling and burning and sinking, swallowing up Edhil and Men and Orcs and goblins and all other manner of creatures without a care for their screams. The mirror showed him the sky, tainted red with rivers of blood that flowed ever on and on until the world itself was filled to the brim with blood, and there was no room left to breathe in for all the blood.

The mirror showed him the Sea once more, showed him water that beat against black, unyielding stone. The water glowed with sickly moonlight, a pallid sheen like oily fire upon the surface of the water. Except, as Elrond stared into the mirror’s depths, he began to notice that the lights he saw were not reflections upon the water, after all. They bobbed about below the surface of the water, swirling and undulating as if belonging to creatures made of light. The longer Elrond peered at them, the more he thought he recognized the shapes they formed beneath the surface of the water. However distorted and deformed they might be, he thought they looked like—

“Elrond?”

There was a hand jostling his shoulder, and Elrond was suddenly entirely aware of his body, stiff and tense upon the hard earth.

“Elrond?”

Aware of his body he might have been, but it took Elrond a moment longer to become truly aware of the world around him. When his eyes, heavy with sleep, finally fluttered open, Celebrimbor was leaning over him, stray locks of hair brushing against the skin of Elrond’s face. It was too dark to make out Celebrimbor’s expression, but his eyes shone in the dark, easily mistaken for the stars that shone far above them.

“Wha…” Elrond slurred, trying and failing to drag his mind away from sleep, enough to… He wasn’t certain what. It had fallen into the gap between the waking world and the dream lands.

“You were tossing in your sleep,” Celebrimbor murmured. He squeezed Elrond’s shoulder gently, before taking his hand away. “I thought it better to wake you before you did yourself an injury.”

No, Elrond supposed Celebrimbor wouldn’t know. “That’s normal,” he muttered, finally managing to shake sleep away enough to sit upright. His mouth felt as if it had spent the last several hours stuffed with wool, dry and sticky and sour-tasting.

Celebrimbor made a small noise in the back of his throat, the quality of which Elrond did not feel at all up to the task of deciphering. “You have nightmares _every_ night?”

“Only when I sleep outside,” Elrond told him wearily.

Celebrimbor muttered something in return about looking forward to the nights ahead, but Elrond was paying him little mind. He could not say or guess if he would dream again, the first having been interrupted, but he was weary in body as well as mood, and sleep would find him even if he was sitting up—if he keeled over onto the hard earth, he would pay for it come the morning.

For as long as he lied awake, he could feel eyes once more directed on his back. Elrond’s pulse raced as he waited for more questions, but none arrived. Eventually, sleep found him again, and he knew no more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Edhel** —Elf (plural: Edhil) (Sindarin)  
>  **Edhil** —Elves (singular: Edhel) (Sindarin)  
>  **Eldar** —‘People of the Stars’ (Quenya); a name first given to the Elves by Oromë when he found them by Cuiviénen, but later came to refer only to those who answered the summons to Aman and set out on the March, with those who chose to remain by Cuiviénen coming to be known as the Avari; the Eldar were composed of these groups: the Vanyar, Ñoldor (those among them who chose to go to Aman), and the Teleri (including their divisions: the Lindar, Falmari, Sindar and Nandor).  
>  **Ennor** —Middle-Earth (Sindarin)  
>  **Ithil** —the Sindarin name for the Moon; of the Sun and the Moon, it is the elder of the two vessels, lit by Telperion’s last flower; in an early version of ‘Of the Sun and Moon and the Hiding of Valinor’ was said to be “the giver of visions” ( _The Lost Road_ 264). As this form is very similar to ‘Isil’, the Quenya form (which is likely to be its original form, as the vessel of the Moon was made in Aman), it is likely that ‘Ithil’ was adapted from ‘Isil’; all I can suppose is that the Valar got in contact with Melian at some point during the First Age to share information.  
>  **Lisgardh** —A marshy region by the Mouths of Sirion, a land of reeds that grow man-high and dense as a forest. Its name in earlier drafts was ‘Arlisgion,’ translated in _The Book of Lost Tales 2_ as “the place of reeds” (155).


	5. Chapter Five

Reigning between them for the next several days was a silence considerably less companionable, a silence that the moaning of the wind and the screech of shy, elusive owls could have no effect upon. There was no hostility to it—at least, Elrond had sensed no hostility, either from Celebrimbor or from within himself, and though he kept rooting around for it, kept trying to pick up on the slightest strain of hostility, nothing ever made itself clear. No hostility, though what reigned instead was hardly any more comfortable.

Elrond had lived most of his life in a state of at least mild discomfort. In the Lisgardh, he had been often cold and always hungry, sharing a thin, lumpy bed with his brother, a bed that had quickly become too small to comfortably accommodate them both. In the Lisgardh, he had always been at least mildly afraid, though he had been at the time too young to understand just what it was that he was supposed to be afraid of.

Among the Exiles, among the… among the Fëanorian camp, there had been Amon Ereb, a fortress town that had never been meant to serve as anyone’s permanent base and had been by that time almost totally depopulated. For the first year, neither Elrond nor Elros were permitted to go down into the town, and by the time they had been, first under heavy supervision and then under considerably lighter supervision, the town had been almost entirely empty, and Elrond and Elros had discovered that it was considerably less fun playing in empty buildings than they would have thought. They had _discovered_ that when they tried to play in an abandoned house or shop, they were instead consumed by questions of just what had happened to the last occupants. And if the fortress itself had been more secure than the refugee camp in the Lisgardh, and Elrond and Elros had had beds to sleep on that could fit each of them comfortably, there hadn’t been any more food than there had been in the Lisgardh, and the same miasma of fear had dimmed the days and dimmed the stars, and this time, Elrond was growing old enough to have a better idea of what he ought to be afraid of.

Then there had come the first, slow convulsions that would eventually spell the doom of Beleriand, and Amon Ereb had crumbled beyond the ability of any builder or architect to repair. Then, they had dispersed into the countryside, dodging Orcs and goblins, dodging Men who had sworn fealty to Morgoth, dodging the Eldar who would have certainly arrested Maedhros and Maglor, perhaps even killed them if it had come down to a fight, for kinslaying was kinslaying until you were facing a Kinslayer, and then kinslaying was doing the world a public service, or so the mutters had gone once Elrond was in Lindon. Then, Elrond had had his vivid, clutching dreams on hard, trembling earth. He had his hunger, he had his combat training with an instructor who could barely look at his sword without seeing the multitude of ghosts who had attached themselves, screaming and vengeful, to his shadow, he had the scattershot training in healing and medicine from a child of Men who acted as their party’s healer, he had wroth and ruin and the fear every day of waking up to find that death itself had joined their party.

So, yes, Elrond knew what it was to live or travel in a place where the very air was so charged with discomfort that it was nearly poisonous to breathe. He had had much experience of that, and if the air in the capital in Lindon was not always charged such, that made no difference on the experience he had already gathered to himself by the time he was grown. He could have gone another five hundred years without ever living under such a cloud, and then, the next time it descended, he would have known it instantly. It was something more familiar to him than any atmosphere of peace and calm he had ever enjoyed in Lindon, and to be honest, finding it again now, Elrond found also that it fit better on his skin than comfort ever had. He knew it better, frankly.

This discomfort was not entirely of the same kind as those other kinds that Elrond had known. It was not as oppressive as those, for one, and it made it easier for him to ride straight-backed on his horse, made it easier for him to ride alongside Celebrimbor, made it easier for his gaze to stray to his traveling companion without feeling anything sustained curiosity and something else that was perhaps mild embarrassment. This discomfort was not rooted in fear, either, fear of either pain or death. Instead, there was a vulnerability to it, but that vulnerability was knotted tightly within the bounds of anticipated discovery and the attempts to fend that off.

It was uncomfortable. It could not have been anything else. But it was not as oppressive as it could have been. Unbound by anything resembling fear, it was easier for Elrond to keep his silence, easier for him to avoid the impulse to fill the silence with chatter, something he and Elros had often did as anxious children who had never known anything but caretakers over-burdened by their ghosts.

They spent their days riding along in this sour, uncomfortable silence, and Elrond wondered if Celebrimbor could feel the sharp edges of discomfort as keenly as he could. Discomfort had no doubt been a close companion of Celebrimbor’s for a long time now, as well.

Celebrimbor had lingered in Nargothrond after his father and third uncle were sent out, after he had repudiated his father and the rest of his house by extension. Celebrimbor had repudiated his family and taken no part in their misdeeds, but Edhil memories were long, Edhil memories were rarely anything resembling forgiving, and whatever you might think of his youth, Elrond had lived in this world long enough to know that blame was rarely directed at those who deserved it exclusively. Even if Orodreth had extended his protection to his cousin’s son, Elrond doubted that Celebrimbor had known much _ease_ in Nargothrond after he had parted ways with his house.

At some point, Elrond had never been able to find out and it certainly didn’t seem appropriate to ask now (and that Elrond was so seriously considering the appropriateness of asking was, he supposed, a testament to his own, personal discomfort), Celebrimbor had left Nargothrond behind and lived on the Isle of Balar instead. Elrond knew little about Celebrimbor’s life there, beyond the fact that he had been employed as a smith, but he thought the tale Gil-galad had relayed to him, of how Celebrimbor had been _stabbed_ by one of the Iathrim survivors of the Second Kinslaying, and his attacker had then been protected by the leader of the Iathrim on Balar—that part might not have been explicitly spelled out, but Elrond was not born _yesterday_ —told Elrond every last thing he needed to know about what Celebrimbor’s life had been like on Balar.

And even in Lindon, even when Celebrimbor was obviously in favor with the High King, even when the more moderate lights among the Sindar—Celeborn, namely—clearly thought well of him, too, Elrond did not think that Celebrimbor knew true _ease_. No, he did not _think_ that; he _knew_ that.

Elrond’s ears were ever open to whispers. He had heard many regarding himself, and those, he endeavored, however poorly, to ignore. No matter if they were whispering of how he had been ‘tainted’ by his association with the Kinslayers, or if they were whispering of how demeaning it was for a prince of the Sindar, the only clear heir of Elu Thingol, to have given his service to the High King of the _Ñoldor_ instead of giving all of his loyalty to his own people, Elrond did not want to hear it. (He would admit that he more readily thought of himself as Sindarin than as one of the Exiles. It was, after all, difficult to look at the _Evening Star_ and regard it as something that had anything at all to do with him. But Elrond would thank those who thought he should cleave always to the Sindar to recall that the blood of the Ñoldor _was_ in his veins, just as much as the blood of the Sindar, or the blood of Men, or the blood of the Ainur.)

Elrond’s ears were ever open to whispers, and he would be shocked if Celebrimbor’s weren’t as well. Perhaps he tarried so long in his forge to avoid the whispers, but even Celebrimbor had to emerge from the forge every once in a while, even if only to avoid starvation, and surely then, his ears must be open. He’d spent so long navigating the hostility of nearly everyone around him, and surely if he had kept his ears closed, he would have drowned in that hostility by now.

Run aground, listen to the scream of wood ripping apart on stone, watch the water come into the ship and lament your own lack of care. Or, _or_ , you can keep aware of your surroundings, you can watch for traps and pitfalls, and you can navigate a hostile world without ever being slain by it. For all that he had always seemed so gentle to Elrond, Elrond knew that gentleness did not equate to weakness. Celebrimbor was still here. That by itself was enough to tell Elrond that whatever else he was, and he thought that Celebrimbor was quite a _lot_ , Celebrimbor was not weak.

Perhaps Celebrimbor could feel the discomfort now. After everything else he had been through, Elrond would not be at all surprised to discover that Celebrimbor had a finely-honed ability to discern when others were having less than sanguine thoughts regarding him. Or perhaps Celebrimbor’s discomfort had nothing to do with Elrond, and he was simply stewing in it now, barely cognizant of Elrond’s presence on the horse beside him.

Whatever else was true, Celebrimbor did not try to ask of Elrond any prying questions during the rest of their journey north. Celebrimbor barely spoke at all during the day, aside from looking to Elrond to ask if he wished to take a rest for lunch now, or if he wanted to stop for the night just before or just after sunset. The longer time wore on, the more Elrond marked his silence, the more he wished for something to break it, but nothing could, and Elrond could not find the words. There was nothing he could think of that he did not fear would open up the door and send pouring out every last fragment of every last monster of the past.

Perhaps, in Lindon. Perhaps, in Tol Himling. Perhaps, in the port town. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…

They rode in silence by day, and Elrond had vivid earth-dreams by night, each more vivid and more troubling than the last. Celebrimbor invariably shook him awake after Elrond began to toss in his sleep, gentle and concerned as he did not seem to allow himself to be when Anor was high in the sky. Elrond might have objected to the constant disruption of his sleep, but he had found that if woken from the dreams, they did not recur in the night. He could sleep, dream for a while, be woken from his dreams by his traveling companion, and then be troubled by them no more for the rest of the night. Not such a bad bargain, Elrond thought.

Now, if only he could dig out the knowledge of the dreams from his mind, and cast them all into the Sea. They were the only place such things belonged.

-0-0-0-

The fair summer weather persisted as they drew further north, and as they neared the port, the land between the mountains and the Sea grew thinner and less densely-forested. Judging by the old maps of Beleriand that Elrond had studied, he thought that they were nearing the place where the waters of Lake Helevorn had once shone like polished obsidian in sunlight and moonlight alike. He had often heard the beauty of the waters praised, and there was a part of him that wished he could have seen it for himself. But the other parts of himself reminded him of history: the waters of the lake had been defiled by the Orcs following the Dagor Bragollach when they had tossed untold numbers of corpses into the lake, until it buzzed with grave-flies and stank of death and its black-glass sheen was turned rancid with corpse-fat. The lake had been defiled, and then, it had been cleansed by the rushing waters of the Sea, but destruction had come parceled into the act of cleansing, and the only trace of the lake now was a deep divot in the land of Forlindon that could be made out in any and all maps of Eriador.

He could not have the sight, no matter how he wished for it.

They were drawing very close to the Sea here, and the cliffs were not so sheer, nor so high. More of Beleriand had been ripped away here, or the land had naturally dipped lower in elevation towards the original bounds of the Sea; Elrond did not know, and he supposed that if his curiosity was still with him when he returned to the capital, he would have to find an atlas and check.

Elrond was always close to the Sea in the capital, but there, the walls were thick, and he did not have to listen to it if he did not want to; all that must be done there was to keep the windows closed. And the Sea seemed _different_ there, locked up in the cage of cliffs and gulf. Though the water was bitter salt and to drink of it would have invited only sickness, it reminded Elrond far more of a river than of the Sea as he had known it by the Lisgardh. Perhaps that was only sensible. This part of the Lhûn had been a river, once, before Beleriand had crumbled and the Sea had come rushing in. Further upstream, it was yet a river.

Elrond was once again close to the Sea, as they skirted around the shores of what had once been the Helevorn, heading towards the port nestled in the new gulf created when the Sea rushed in to mingle with the defiled waters of what had once been a prized, beautiful lake. He was close to the Sea, and there was no building he could take shelter in, no window he could close, to shut out its voice.

It was calling, but not to him. That it called not to him did not change the fact that Elrond could hear it calling. Such a sweet song, such a profoundly powerful song, and Elrond understood instantly why it was that there were those who heard it and became obsessed. This was the closest he ever came to understanding his father, and the knowledge brought him a sliver of greater wisdom, and no joy.

Elrond could hear the Sea calling, and the calls were not for him. It was a bit like being in a room, and hearing from another room someone singing to an audience. You could listen to the song all you liked, and you could tell yourself you weren’t eavesdropping all you liked, and that would not make you feel any less like an eavesdropper, not make you feel any less like you were risking some punishment or other misfortune for having listened to something that was not intended for you.

The water rushed and roared, breaking against the shore with a tremendous crash. The seagulls cried, screeching to make themselves heard over the pounding roar of a body that had a life and a presence and a voice so far beyond theirs that Elrond thought he would have had a better time pitting his strength against Aran Einior and Elbereth in Valinor than being a seagull trying to make its voice consistently heard over the Sea.

The water rushed and roared, the Sea never abating in its slow consumption of the lands it touched to its lips. Somewhere down deep in its throat was lodged the fragments of Beleriand-that-was. It would not give Beleriand back to him, and thus, Elrond tried not to listen when the Sea called. Easier for him than it was for those who the Sea called to, but still, the call of the Sea nagged at him.

The wind changed, carrying the strange non-smells of water and salt that yet managed to form such a striking, distinctive odor when put together to Elrond’s nose. It held no true pull for him. He had spent only a few years in the Lisgardh, but that had been enough time for him to become totally desensitized to any hooks the smell of the Sea might have been able to sink into his flesh. Indeed, the salt wind turning towards him only strengthened Elrond’s desire to shut his ears to any noise that might be carried from the shoreline. If it was going to batter against him directly, then Elrond did not want to hear it. He did not want to hear the pulse of water, did not want to hear the seagulls screaming to make themselves heard, did not want to hear the thunderous crash of tons of water striking against land that was never made to be a beach.

He did not want to hear singing.

Oh, how he did not want to hear singing.

He did not want to know what he would do, if he heard singing.

As they made the journey north, the Sea their constant companion, obscured only by a thin fence of short, stumpy trees, there came a change in Celebrimbor’s attitude.

None of that made its way into speech. Though Celebrimbor still spoke to Elrond but little, what little he did say was as congenial as it had ever been; at the very least, no sharpness had entered into Celebrimbor’s voice, and no harshness had entered into his expression. But Elrond had little else to watch during the days but him, and as he watched Celebrimbor ride north alongside him on the deserted road, he watched the change coming over him with increasing concern.

When they had first set out from the capital, Celebrimbor had ridden upright, back straight and head held high. It had been… It had not always been the easiest thing to watch. Celebrimbor had clearly been taught to ride after the fashion of a Ñoldorin prince, just as Elrond and Elros had been, when they were children. When he sat a horse, his posture and his manner with the horse put Elrond in mind of no one so much as it put him in mind of Maedhros. He struck a fine figure, certainly, and if there had been no association to anything else, Elrond would have enjoyed watching him ride alongside him. But as it stood, Elrond could not look at him without being jarred by the fact that his hair was black and not red, that his skin was so much darker in shade than Maedhros’s own pale skin, that his flesh was so unscarred, that he set two hands upon the reins instead of just one.

But as they drew closer to the Sea, Celebrimbor’s posture had begun to change. He began to slouch in the saddle, his head bowed, almost lolling, as if he was riding in a state of half-wakefulness, half-sleep. His silence no longer seemed the silence of someone who was avoiding speaking to his traveling companion so much as it seemed the silence of someone who just wished to shut the world out of their head, and the only way they could find to do that was to try to ignore every last thing around them, to go through life half-awake.

Perhaps that was it, but the longer Elrond watched Celebrimbor ride in such a manner, the less he looked like someone who was slouching in an act of conscious will, but someone who was suffering illness or even injury. Like someone who was weighted down by a yoke.

They spoke nothing of it. The road beckoned, and so did the Sea, though it called for neither of them. They were going to be spending a lot of time by the Sea, in the next several days. There would be plenty of time to contend with it, later. Plenty of time for Elrond to try to think of something to say, as well.

-0-0-0-

They reached the port town on schedule, late in the afternoon as the winds were changing. Winds blowing west ruffled the waters of what had once been Lake Helevorn, and were now the Sea, striking against the waves flowing east and turning the water to turmoil, a little like boiling water in a pot. The mountains loomed grayish-purple and snow-capped, and fringing them were not only pine and cedar and fir trees, but thick clouds the gray of soiled wool. Elrond looked at them with some consternation as they entered the town, brow furrowed. If a storm came up from the east, the trip might be delayed, or called off altogether. The idea of being packed off back to the capital without having even been given the _chance_ to tackle Himring had his blood throb in his veins.

Alas, not present among any powers of Elrond’s was the power to influence in any way the natural weather of the world. He would have to wait, and see, and hope. However silly hope seemed to him these days, after he had hoped for Beleriand to still be there once the war was over, and he had instead watched Beleriand crumble into the Sea. However silly hope seemed to him when there had been a time when he and Elros had been _convinced_ that their parents would come for them sooner or later. However silly hope seemed when he had thought perhaps, _perhaps_ , that obsession would be weaker than—

The point was, hoping for fairer weather seemed a little silly. Elrond found himself hoping for it anyways.

Celebrimbor handled the mariners. He knew these men, apparently, and honestly, people who knew Celebrimbor being happy to see him again for the first time after a long absence, as the shouts and whoops when Celebrimbor approached the ship they were attending to, seemed to indicate, was enough of a novelty that Elrond would just leave him to it. There were a select few in the capital who showed themselves actively glad to have Celebrimbor enter their company, but the shouts of welcome had been a surprise to Elrond—considering how high and how fast Celebrimbor’s eyebrows had shot up, it hadn’t exactly been expected by him, either. Elrond would not intrude upon it.

That was done with soon enough. The mariners had received clear orders from Círdan, and had no true reservations about their destination, so long as they themselves were not expected to set foot on Tol Himling. The captain was adamant on that point, actually, and Elrond could not help but mark it, staring at him intently the rest of the time that they were down at the quays. He kept looking for any hint of the reason why, but nothing ever emerged on the weathered grains of the man’s face.

Sailors were superstitious. Círdan had related enough of those superstitions to Elrond, and how widespread those superstitions were, for Elrond to know that sailors tended towards superstition. Oh, true, the trait was not universal, and true, some of those superstitions—many of them, if we are being honest—were perfectly justified, considering what their world was like. The fact that the superstitions were perfectly grounded in reality, perfectly justified, did not do much to allay Elrond’s suddenly aroused worries, in this case.

They would not tell him, he could guess. They would not tell him, and Elrond was not yet so talented at picking apart the locks on the doors of people’s minds that they wouldn’t have been able to feel him doing it. And besides the practicality of the matter, unless matters were truly dire, the discourtesy involved in such an invasion was enough that if Elrond indulged, the indulgence might cost him the expedition.

He would find out for himself. Most likely, the sailors thought the island haunted, or cursed, or it was something to do with Himring having been ruled by the head of a house of kinslayers. Perhaps Elrond would _not_ find out for himself, for perhaps nothing would happen that would justify why the sailors wanted no part of Tol Himling for themselves, in spite of all the treasure that could be found there. He thought he would prefer that. He needed for the assignment to go well. It would go better if he was able to take a preliminary inventory, perhaps take a few small pieces of treasure away with him, and _nothing else happened_.

“How do you know them?” Elrond asked quietly as they made their way away from the quays, towards the nicer of the town’s two inns. Now, he had to ask now; any later would be too late and the question would become too awkward to be asked. “I haven’t heard of you being much involved in sailing, or building ships.”

“I’m not.” Celebrimbor looked at him out of the corner of his eye, a scant gleam of pale gray. He was riding a little straighter in his saddle, but there was still a slouch to his shoulders that made Elrond want to lean over and press a hand to his back until he was sitting up straight again.

That… Elrond pushed the thought out of his mind, and raised his eyebrows, prompting, expectant.

A small huff of a laugh escaped Celebrimbor’s mouth. “You’re not going to let it go, are you? I suppose this is revenge.” Before Elrond could make a retort, Celebrimbor cut him off. “It was a little while ago,” he murmured, voice abstracted and gaze far away, “when we were living on Balar.”

When Celebrimbor had been a little-loved refugee from Nargothrond, Elrond gathered. His stomach began to churn, just a little. Hungry for stories as he was, a story of Celebrimbor on Balar sounded…

Celebrimbor was still going, regardless of Elrond’s comfort or discomfort. “It was in the autumn. I forget which year, exactly, but Ereinion was still quite young and that autumn had been bad for storms.” He leaned forward, stroking the back of his horse’s head with one gloved hand. “One day, there was a shipwreck on the shoals around a mile off-shore. The ship’s dinghies had all been destroyed in the wreck and the waters were too choppy for the sailors who had survived to try to swim to shore. We could see the survivors clinging to the shoal, but the storm was still raging. There were few who were willing to go out to try to retrieve them.

“Círdan rounded up anyone who was willing, and, well—“ Celebrimbor waved his hand through the air “—I was willing. I knew little of sailing, but I knew much of death, and I wasn’t just about to stand on the shore and watch as they all _died_.

“I got into one of our longboats and worked one of the sets of rows as we went out to get them. It was hard work, and the boat was nearly capsized twice, but we managed to save around… I forget, I think eighteen or nineteen of the sailors? As we were rowing back for Balar, I turned around a moment.” Celebrimbor ran his teeth over his lower lip, a bright, uneasy gleam in his eyes. “The broken ship was sinking. The water was rushing over the sides into it, and you know, for a moment, the waves looked like hands, pulling the ship down into the Sea. It was probably nothing. There were many tales of what had become of the mariners Turgon sent out to try to reach Valinor circulating among the Falathrim by this time, and it was easy to imagine…”

And with that, Celebrimbor stopped talking, staring down at his hands as he clutched tightly at his horse’s reins.

Elrond tilted his head, trying to get a better look into Celebrimbor’s face. “Yes?” he prompted.

“It’s _nothing_ , Elrond,” Celebrimbor reiterated firmly. “It’s nothing we need to speak of. Nothing we need to be worried about, now that the Valar have reconciled themselves to the Exiles yet living in Ennor. To speak of it would only bode ill for tomorrow’s journey.”

And after that, he truly would say no more, regardless of Elrond’s prodding. But Elrond could guess. Even if the Lisgardh had been home to refugees from Doriath, by the time he was born, the greater part of them had come from Gondolin, and many of those had been Ñoldor, born in Valinor in times of endless light. Though Elrond had been at the time too young to understand what it truly meant, he was hardly unfamiliar with the sort of attitude Celebrimbor had skirted around.

Bode ill, indeed, Elrond thought darkly. But bode ill for whom, exactly?

-0-0-0-

“Welcome, good sirs,” the proprietor of the inn, mercifully oblivious to their true identities, greeted them as they stepped into the common room and Elrond passed her a small purse, “to the Laughing Lake. Your room is upstairs, the last one on the left, on the opposite side of the statue of Nahar. Now—“ somebody shouted about a lack of ale and the proprietor rolled her eyes “—if you’ll excuse me…”

“Interesting name for an inn,” Elrond muttered to Celebrimbor, once he could be certain that the proprietor was no longer close enough nearby to hear him. “I don’t remember Lake Helevorn ever being called such in any of the books or reports I’ve read. Was it some jest of your uncle’s?”

“My uncle Caranthir was not known for jesting,” Celebrimbor mumbled, and said no more, instead taking a seat at one of the tables by a window, a rickety, splintered little thing cast deep in shadow.

Elrond stared at Celebrimbor, sitting hunched in a chair that was not quite large enough to fit him comfortably. After nearly half a minute, Celebrimbor had had made no attempt to flag down the server hurrying to and fro across the common room with bowls of stew in hand, and Elrond? Quite frankly, Elrond was hungry, and was in no mood to wait for Celebrimbor to make a move.

The next time the server came close by, Elrond tapped her on the shoulder. “Pray, what is in that stew?”

“Lentils, potatoes, and the last of the spring vegetables,” she replied, in the harried tone of someone who clearly had at least one ear trained on the rest of the room for unruly patrons. “We used a pork bone for flavor.”

“Anything else?”

“Pierogis with ground pork and onions. No parsley right now; we’re out.”

Elrond frowned a little, in spite of himself. “No fruit?”

She grimaced. “Our strawberries were doing nicely, but a blight put an end to _that_. We won’t have any more fruit until the apples ripen, not unless my brother’s _really_ lucky with that poor orange tree he’s growing out back.”

Personally, Elrond thought the server’s brother was going to need a lot more than luck to do _anything_ with an orange tree this far north, besides kill it. Unless, he, too, claimed descent from a Maia and had as part of that strange inheritance a miraculous green thumb, or else had access to wood-witchery that Elrond had never heard rumor of (though certain things _were_ said of the Nandor and the Nelyarin Avari), death seemed the only option. However, Elrond was still hungry, this inn had food that was _fresh_ , and he did not especially want the flavor ruined by this woman spitting in it.

“Stew and pierogis,” he said, softly enough as not to risk any objections from Celebrimbor. It was probably well enough that Celebrimbor had gone to stare out the window, for he would otherwise certainly had spotted Elrond nodding at him. “Enough for both of us.”

“Just a few minutes.”

Food ordered, Elrond went to sit down in the chair opposite Celebrimbor’s, biting back a sigh as he did so. The chairs were even more rickety to sit in than they were to look at. He’d known worse, certainly, but he’d also thought his days of sitting on furniture good only for firewood were behind him. Evidently not.

_If the assignment goes well, the town may benefit as well._

But any benefit to this town was likely far off, and would be slow to truly take root. Better to focus on what was available in the more immediate future. Like the possibility of _travel_ , of being trusted to travel to far-off lands on his own and increase his knowledge without any need for a chaperone. A pretty thought, indeed.

A pretty thought, and not enough to keep out the twinge in the pit of Elrond’s stomach when Celebrimbor’s abstracted expression never broke, when he never acknowledged Elrond’s presence, when he never sat up straight in his chair.

It was not Elrond’s problem, or, at least, it should not have felt like Elrond’s problem. So long as Celebrimbor was up to the task of acting as his guide come the morrow, whatever other state Celebrimbor was in should not have been Elrond’s concern. They were not bosom friends. They did not know each other well, and the things Celebrimbor kept _wanting_ to know about were—

“You’ve not been yourself.” The decision to care, regardless, was a frighteningly easy one to make. It felt like nothing quite so much as it felt like putting a knife to his own throat and pressing the blade in, just shy of the force he would need to break the skin. “For days. Are you ill?”

He’d shown no other sign of illness, at least not any that Elrond recognized in his admittedly patchy (hopefully one day less patchy) knowledge of healing and medicine. Elrond could not guess at any other thing that could have been wrong, at least not readily. _There is something else, something else it could be…_

Elrond wasn’t certain what the signs of that would have been in Celebrimbor. Perhaps he would learn better.

And perhaps he would have to press and pry in order to learn anything at all.

At length, Celebrimbor dragged his eyes away from staring out of the window, though Elrond would be lying if he said he thought that Celebrimbor’s gaze was fixed _entirely_ upon him. His attention seemed to be focused elsewhere, on something Elrond could not see nor grasp at. He was picking at his left hand, rolling a delicate gold ring with a single red gem set into it that he had begun to wear a couple of days prior, a mannerism Elrond had never observed in him before (And one of the few he would continue to observe after all of this was over, but we are getting ahead of ourselves here).

“I am well enough to serve, Elrond,” Celebrimbor told him, his voice wavering strangely. He smiled, and that smile wavered too, like light rippling on the surface of churning water. “You needn’t worry about that.”

Elrond stiffened, praying that the heat he felt crawling up his neck came only from the stuffy heat of the not terribly well-ventilated common room. He was certain he would have felt it if Celebrimbor had been rummaging around in his head (wasn’t willing to discount that as an ability possessed by a man who had been born in the light of Telperion and Laurelin, wasn’t willing to discount that as an ability possessed by the one and only grandson of Fëanor, he who was renowned as the most talented of all of the Eldar in all that he chose to set his mind to), but such a remark struck hard at him. If it was intentional. If Celebrimbor actually meant anything by it.

Elrond scoured his face, mouth reflexively twisting into a deep frown, and he could not see if Celebrimbor meant anything by it at all.

(He had a suspicion he wasn’t going to shake off the feeling that he had.)

“I…”

To say what he wished to say felt like the height of hypocrisy, from someone who had just now been thinking that if Celebrimbor was only able to perform his task as Elrond’s guide, the knower of passwords and secret passageways, the knower of crumbling streets and spires that stretched towards the sky like naked bones. The thought had been… Well, it hadn’t been very gracious. Elrond was aware of that. He thought things that weren’t gracious all the time, and even if he did not try to stop himself from thinking them, he at least _knew_ that they did him no favors, and others no services.

It wasn’t enough to stop him having those thoughts. Nothing ever was. But he knew when they were unacceptable, enough to keep from voicing them aloud. For the most part.

For the most part.

“I… thank you for that reassurance.” And for now, he would swallow on anything ungracious he could have said. The moment felt premature, and they were hardly alone in this common room. If Elrond was interested in anything, he was _not_ interested in having an audience in the form of over a dozen strangers who would gawk greedily at the contents of their lives being spread out before them like a smorgasbord. His life was not for public consumption. “But that is not what I meant.”

“It’s what _I_ meant,” Celebrimbor retorted, one eyebrow arched delicately. “I am here to act as your guide; I am to understand that you don’t like to think of me as a chaperone,” he added, trying for wry and failing at it so spectacularly that Elrond had to restrain a wince. “I promise you, I have forgotten nothing since my last visit. The fortress holds no secrets for me, and thus, it will hold no secrets for you that will be enough to keep you from doing whatever you wish there.”

And that was certainly reassuring. But it wasn’t what Elrond _meant_ , and deliberate obtuseness did not suit Celebrimbor, not at all. Elrond did not have to know Celebrimbor well to know _that_ ; to be frank, he did not think deliberate obtuseness particularly suited _anyone_.

The image of them unlocking the secrets of long-abandoned Himring together, learning what weathered stones and battered spires had to tell them, learning the stories of treasure vaults long hidden away from the light of day, disturbing the dust and the cobwebs and the secrets that thought that time would shield them forever… The image was a powerful one. It clung to the walls of Elrond’s mind like ivy. But Celebrimbor carrying on like this, making a mystery out of himself, so abstracted, barely rooted in this present reality—

“Here you are.”

Their food had arrived. Celebrimbor, despite having given no input into the obtaining of the meal, made no complaint about the food that had been put down in front of him—but then, the man had never voiced a single complaint about the travel rations they had been eating during the trip here, so expecting him to complain about _fresh_ food had probably been an exercise in futility the whole time.

They ate in silence. Celebrimbor kept his head bowed over his rough, chipped clay stew bowl, picking at his food but still slowly, steadily eating it.

Elrond also ate slowly, in silence, picking at his food to start with, though in his case, he didn’t really think he could be blamed for it. It was hard to eat with true enthusiasm when you were keeping such close watch over someone else, waiting for any change in their expression, any change at all. Especially when they never gave you anything to work with at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Aran Einior** —Manwë
> 
>  **Anor** —the Sindarin name for the Sun  
>  **Edhil** —Elves (singular: Edhel) (Sindarin)  
>  **Eldar** —‘People of the Stars’ (Quenya); a name first given to the Elves by Oromë when he found them by Cuiviénen, but later came to refer only to those who answered the summons to Aman and set out on the March, with those who chose to remain by Cuiviénen coming to be known as the Avari; the Eldar were composed of these groups: the Vanyar, Ñoldor (those among them who chose to go to Aman), and the Teleri (including their divisions: the Lindar, Falmari, Sindar and Nandor).  
>  **Ennor** —Middle-Earth (Sindarin)  
>  **Falathrim** —‘People of the foaming shore’ (Sindarin) or ‘Coast people’ (Sindarin); the Sindar of the Havens of the Falas in Beleriand; Círdan’s people.  
>  **Iathrim** —the Sindar of Doriath  
>  **Lisgardh** —A marshy region by the Mouths of Sirion, a land of reeds that grow man-high and dense as a forest. Its name in earlier drafts was ‘Arlisgion,’ translated in The Book of Lost Tales 2 as “the place of reeds” (155).  
>  **Nelyar** —‘Thirds’, the third clan of the Elves of Cuiviénen, who were named for Enel and Enelyë, the former of whom was the third Elf to awaken (Singular: Nelya) (Adjectival form: Nelyarin). The clan name they gave themselves was ‘Lindar’, meaning ‘Singers’ (rendered in Telerin as ‘Lindai’; rendered in Primitive Quendian as ‘lindā’ or ‘glindā, though the latter appears only in Sindarin), for it was said that they learned to sing before they learned to speak. During the Great March, they were dubbed the Teleri, ‘those at the end of the line, the hindmost’, for they were the last to leave Cuiviénen, and often lagged behind. This clan encompasses many different groups: the Falmari of Aman, the Sindar, and the Nandor (Which itself encompasses the Laiquendi and the Silvan-folk).


	6. Chapter Six

That night, Elrond slept well for the first time in days. Then again, ‘well’ might not be the best word for it—he could not remember the last time he had slept on a bed so lumpy without his ‘bed’ being the cold, hard ground, and the walls between the room he and Celebrimbor shared and the next one over were so thin that Elrond could hear their neighbor snoring, with _painful_ clarity. But he had no dreams that night, let alone those that could haunt him hours into watchfulness, and after several days of enduring such, Elrond’s standards might have fallen a _little_.

There were no bizarre, vivid dreams to dog Elrond into the daylight, and thus, by one measure, he could be said to have slept well. By other measures…

It was in the dead of night, woolen clouds hiding the slowly-swelling face of Ithil and plunging the world into near-total darkness, when Elrond first awoke. One of the many gifts he had been left from the latter portion of his childhood was a tendency to sleep lightly. There had been many night raids in the final, tumultuous years of Beleriand, many sudden earthquakes, many sudden appearances by starving wolves or bears hoping for easy prey in the form of sleeping Edhil or Men. It had not paid to sleep so deeply that a snapping branch or a quickly-swallowed curse off in the gloom outside the campfire, or the slow trembling of the earth before the quake _really_ began were guaranteed never to be enough to wake you. They’d lost at least one guard that way, and Elrond thought there might have been more—when he tried to focus on it, his memory was not particularly cooperative.

In this case, a rustling in the darkness woke Elrond from his shallow, dreamless sleep, and in those first few moments of struggling wakefulness, blood racing and heart in his throat, he thought that someone was trying to enter their room. He propped himself up on his elbows, glancing wildly around the room. For weapons, he had brought with him only a dagger. Celebrimbor had a short sword, but Elrond did not know where he had put it and had no idea if either of them could have reached it quickly enough, regardless. Elrond was no great warrior, and he’d never heard Celebrimbor described as such. He could only imagine how they would have fared in a fight, in such cramped quarters, with the only means of escape the way by which their attackers had entered.

But as more of Elrond’s mind seeped back into the waking world, he could make out more clearly the rustling noise he had heard, and he realized that it was not the metallic sound of a lock being tried, but the sound of rustling cloth. Elrond sank back down into the lumpy mattress as all of the tension present in his body left it at once, leaving him weak and sweating, gratitude mingled with irritation and lingering fear. What was _that_ noise supposed to be? he wondered tetchily. What was it that had woken him from sleep in such a fashion?

There could not be many candidates. For all that the Laughing Lake was the nicer of the two inns in town, it was hardly what anyone would have called _luxurious_. Their room was a small one, the only furniture the two narrow beds separated by maybe four feet, a battered old wardrobe, and a single wicker chair with one leg shorter than the other three. The floors were bare, rough wood; if you wanted to avoid splinters, you had best keep your skin _away_.

So, it was inevitable that Elrond’s gaze would drift to the other bed. It was inevitable, for their room was small and sparsely furnished and there was little else it _could_ have been.

It took little time for Elrond’s eyes to adjust to the dark, at least as much as they were ever going to. When they did, it was easy to spot movement. Easy to pinpoint the source of that whispering noise of rustling cloth.

Rather less easy to decide what to do about it.

The first time, at least, Elrond was spared having to decide what to do about it. As soon as he had pinpointed the source of the noise, sleep found him again, spreading its fingers across his back, and he dropped back down into the restless embrace of his shallow sleep.

The second time, the darkness was thicker—clouds yet persistently hid the shy face of Ithil, and night had fallen so long over the town that there were no lights left burning within any of the nearby shops or houses. This time, Elrond woke to the whisper of rustling cloth, and to a soft, whining moan that when Elrond was still half-locked in sleep sounded more like the moan of the wind than a moan that could escape the mouth of a man. This time, when Elrond woke, he felt no alarm. Memory was a treacherous, slippery thing to hold onto in the interstice between waking and sleep, but he had managed to grasp onto it well enough to recognize the sounds for what they were.

His eyes fluttered open, and rested upon the shivering form in the bed next to his own.

This time, sleep did not come and find Elrond as soon as he had realized what it was he was listening to. This time, when Elrond woke, he woke firmly, knowing that sleep would find him no more easily than it would when he had first lied down in the evening. He lied on his side in bed, watching Celebrimbor fret in his sleep, locked in a dream that did not seem to have truly let him go the whole night. What sort of dream must it be? he wondered, unease latching onto him with delicate and razor-sharp hooks. He could guess. Oh, he could guess. Had Elrond not had dreams like this? Had he not had dreams like this as recently as the very night before?

He was awake again. He was watching it play out, again.

Every dream he had ever had while lying against the hard earth passed through Elrond’s mind, fragments of terror and confusion that formed one great, hulking mass, large enough to devour and hungry enough to try. There were many who had said that dreams had no power to hurt the dreamer, but Elrond knew the truth: dreams had teeth, and their teeth were sharp enough to rend. Elrond had felt them sink into his flesh countless times, and he was never quite able to shake the surprise when he looked at himself and did not see the scars those teeth should surely have left behind.

Elrond could not do battle against dreams. He had learned the futility of trying as a child who could do nothing against his dreams except struggle fruitlessly and cry, unable to escape them by any means other than by waking with the rising of Anor, or else being woken up by his brother or by Maglor. Dreams were something that you could neither strike nor even hold. They could do grievous harm to you, of course, but they were so intangible that attacking them was like striking out against smoke. It was both foolish and fruitless.

There were so many things that it was foolish and fruitless to struggle against, of course. Dreams were simply one of those, and more persistent than most.

Elrond had engaged in many foolish and fruitless struggles in his short life. Even when he achieved nothing more meaningful than raising a few scuff marks on the wall he had been kicking, he found himself struggling anyways.

He drew a deep breath through his nose, and reached for his shoes.

Only when he was standing over the other bed did it finally occur to Elrond to wonder just how Celebrimbor might take to being woken from a deep sleep. The darkness was near-absolute, and standing inside of it, unable to make out the lines and boundaries of his own body, it was easier to think of certain things than it had been when Elrond was more aware of himself. One of those things came trudging up out of the recesses of memory:

Maedhros locked in a nightmare, twisting and turning in his pallet by the campfire. Maglor leaning close over him, long dark hair turning him faceless in the gloom, one spindly hand reaching for his brother’s shoulder. The flash of firelit steel as Maedhros drew his dagger before he was even fully awake. Elros’s strangled cry. Elrond’s own white-lipped, blood-pounding silence. At length, Maedhros’s mumbled apology, and Maglor’s crawling away from him like some ragged creature out of a nightmare, something that crept along the ground when it should have walked, head bowed and shoulders hunched and utterly ignorant of the blood leaking from its skinny body.

It was a memory that belonged only to the dark. Whenever Elrond’s mind drifted towards it in daylight, none of it made any sense. But it made sense here. In a place where the logic of a dream did not feel so outlandish, it made sense.

Celebrimbor was not the same as either of them. If you went to Celebrimbor seeking a sharp edge anywhere in his character, you would be searching a long time before you found it—if you ever found it at all. The memory of it, though, it clung to Elrond’s mind, firelight and shadow and wet, wet blood.

Do you wake a man from sleep, when you know he could have a dagger secreted under his pillow?

At least the walls were thin enough that anyone in the building would have been able to hear Elrond scream.

“Celebrimbor?” Elrond put a hand to Celebrimbor’s shoulder and shook, as gently as he could. Though the flesh under his hand, hot and close even through the thin fabric of Celebrimbor’s shirt, trembled, it was the trembling of a man yet locked in the landscape of his dreams. There was no will behind it. “Celebrimbor, wake up.”

No reply. Elrond bit his lip as he shook a little harder. He supposed he could not expect everyone to be the light sleeper that he was, but most he had either woken from dreaming or watched woken from dreaming gave way under such a touch. He supposed he could have started moving the bed—either bed, and moving Celebrimbor’s held a particular appeal—and see if the noise and vibrations would have done the trick, but Elrond had a sudden vision of the bedframe collapsing or the floor giving out and sending them plunging down into the ground floor, and he decided a different tack would be needed.

Just what that different tack was supposed to be, now…

A strangled whisper greeted Elrond’s ears out of the dark, and it was then that Elrond, biting his tongue this time to hold in some invective he was better off not thinking about too hard, guessed at what was needed. It was too dark, the gloom too thick, for him to make out Celebrimbor’s face, anyways. Elrond’s own sight was not keen enough to guess at the emotions that gripped his companion’s features. Not keen enough to serve as the only guide of what to do.

The candle stick was sitting on the windowsill, a crudely-fashioned candle of stinking tallow sitting in the brass candle stick. Elrond wrinkled his nose as he lit a match, but such a gesture was insufficient to block out the stink that rose anew as the wax began to bubble and drip once more.

If the town did benefit from the expedition in any way, Elrond hoped that it would be to acquire the funds needed to buy sweeter-smelling candles. The nicer inn in town, and they couldn’t even—

“Celebrimbor?” Elrond called once more, trying to put all thoughts of candles from his mind. He’d gone a good portion of his life without any candles at all, having to make do with the light of a campfire for his reading. He should _think_ he could go a single night with one that stank of greasy animal fat, if it meant he got to have one at all.

The light, meager and bobbing as it was, allowed Elrond to see what had been invisible to him in the dark, and…

Well, as far as nightmares went, Elrond had seen many more violent than this, in his time. There was _movement_ , but no thrashing. There was whimpering, but no screaming. There was sweat in quantities unequal to the cool of the summer night by the boundaries of the Sea, but no tears.

Elrond had seen many people trapped in the throes of nightmares more violent than this one. That did not make Celebrimbor trapped in the throes of his own easier to watch. He had at some point kicked the bedsheets nearly to the foot of the bed; they were tangled in his legs like chains, writhing under the force of one so weakened by his own sleep. And when Elrond had deemed him not to be crying, perhaps he had been correct, but it was a near thing.

In the pale pool of candlelight cast over the bed, Celebrimbor looked weaker than Elrond had ever seen him. The weakness that gripped him was not the vulnerability of sleep, not alone. Elrond imagined leaving him in its grip until morning. He imagined doing that, and imagined what sort of state Celebrimbor might be in by the time Anor rose over the mountains and Celebrimbor had to face the world after a full night of uneasy sleep dogged by whatever it was that harried him there. He imagined even having to let Celebrimbor lean on his shoulder as they made their way down to the quays, and the jostling of the water against the sides of the ship only worsening Celebrimbor’s state until, by the time they reached Tol Himling, Celebrimbor might have to be carried onto the island itself. And perhaps he would recover while they were on the island, but if not…

If not…

_I think I’m quick enough to step back from a dagger_ , Elrond thought wryly as he reached down again, but the thought was an absent one, and seemed less important than it had when he yet stood in the dark. The pragmatism of the measure seemed less important with every inch of empty air between his hand and Celebrimbor’s shoulder put aside.

“Celebrimbor.” This time, he did not speak in a soft tone. Not to say that Elrond shouted—his own experiences with sleep were such that he at least understood why it was generally considered bad form to go about unintentionally disrupting the sleep of people in the nearby vicinity while intentionally disrupting the sleep of people right next to him—but clearly, whispering and murmuring wasn’t going to cut it.

Actually, Elrond had rather hoped that the light and the calling of his name might have cut it on their own. Daggers were a distant concern, now, but a distant concern was still a concern, and Celebrimbor had led an _interesting_ life; there was no telling in what places and in what ways that would show itself in behaviors and actions. The fact that someone was bound to hear Elrond screaming was poor consolation for the fact that if Elrond got stabbed, he probably wouldn’t be able to get on the ship in the morning.

If Celebrimbor wasn’t well enough to make the trip down to the quays, Elrond probably wouldn’t be getting on the ship tomorrow, either. If Celebrimbor wasn’t well in the morning, and Elrond had to sit by him and looking at him knowing there was something he could have done—

Knowing Celebrimbor, it would probably only be a light stabbing. That was definitely something that was a concept present in Celebrimbor’s mind.

Elrond sighed, gritted his teeth, and roughly jostled Celebrimbor’s shoulder. “Celebrimbor, you’re only dreaming.” He would have liked a gentler tone than the short one that escaped his mouth; why was it that when he actively set out to comfort someone, he could only manage this? The sharp twinge in the pit of his stomach only spurred him on to shake Celebrimbor’s shoulder once more. “Celebrimbor, it’s only a _dream._ ”

Celebrimbor’s pale eyes fluttered open, at first sightless and darting all over the room. Later, Elrond would wonder if his own interference had even had anything to do with Celebrimbor’s sudden waking, for Celebrimbor did not seem even to register his presence standing over the bed, staring down into his face, not at first. In the moment, Elrond did not think to wonder about that—of _course_ he didn’t—instead only thinking to count himself grateful that the feared dagger never materialized in Celebrimbor’s hand. He wasn’t going to mourn the passed-up opportunity for violence. He’d stomached enough violence in his life already.

Elrond stood in silence, staring down awkwardly at him as Celebrimbor slowly, laboriously regained his bearings. He could not begin to guess what was going through Celebrimbor’s mind—any essay at finding out would surely have only engendered greater alarm—as he lied there spread-eagle on his back, arms and legs bent at odd angles, hair all over his face, the light in his eyes flickering like a candle being blown on by a bored child as he blinked, blinked, blinked sleep out of his eyes. Elrond had never seen such alarm etched into Celebrimbor’s face when he was awake. The sight of it was oddly arresting, though Elrond could not have said why.

At last, Celebrimbor’s eyes cleared. Half-obscured by the thick curtain of his loose, dark hair, they settled upon Elrond’s face, wide and still visibly panicked, pupils dilated so greatly that his pale irides were barely visible.

Their eyes locked, and Elrond opened his mouth, but found he could not speak. His mouth had run dry of words. Even the thought of what might have comforted Celebrimbor to hear it spoken aloud was not present in his mind. He could only meet Celebrimbor’s gaze, and stare.

A small, strangled laugh jarred from Celebrimbor’s mouth, matching the quiver of his lips so well that Elrond was surprised it did not linger there longer. He lifted a trembling hand to his head, and slowly, carefully brushed his hair out of his face. “Is it morning already?” he asked, in a voice that would have been appealing, if not for the little shake that made it pitch higher than what was altogether natural.

Elrond glanced momentarily at his candle—was the light of the flame really so bright?—before shaking his head. “Some hours away, yet.”

Meanwhile, Celebrimbor was sitting up in bed, easily hoisting himself up on his muscular arms (The fabric of his nightshirt was thin enough that Elrond could easily make out his muscles working beneath the cloth). Now sitting on the edge of the bed, his own gaze drifted past the boundaries of candlelight, to shadow and gloom, and his mouth twisted in something that might have been a wry smile; the shadows cast by the candle were so deep that they exaggerated the expression into a bizarre slash of a grimace. “…I see. …I should have realized that.”

The silence between them quickly grew thick and charged. Elrond stiffened as he became increasingly convinced that a rebuke would be soon to follow. He always carried the memories of his dreams into the waking world, even if those memories were fractured and glinted like shards of glass out of a broken mirror. His experiences of dreams, he had noticed, were not universal—indeed, it seemed more common for people not to remember that they had been dreaming at all.

An odd mixture of gratitude and indignation shot through him when Celebrimbor did not make any move towards rebuke, instead tilting his head, sleepy and oddly child-like, his long, thick hair brushing against his cheek. There was an odd expectancy in Celebrimbor’s eyes; Elrond’s skin prickled as if touched by a strange hand.

The moment passed; Celebrimbor sighed and ducked his head. “Was I dreaming?” he asked, and there was nothing in his voice that could have hearkened to anything but the words that had come from his mouth.

Elrond rolled the words over in his mind, and still, he could find no subtext, no hint of anything other than what the simple question had conveyed. He relaxed, the tension seeping out of his shoulders. “Yes,” he mumbled, yet not quite able to make eye contact, after such a long time staring. “It seemed you were having a violent nightmare. I thought it better to wake you.”

Even without looking, Elrond could feel Celebrimbor’s eyes on his face. There was not the weight of expectancy, not a weight heavy enough to feel like a physical touch, but still, it was a strange, intense look for a man who had just been forcibly roused from sleep. He glanced through the curtain of his own loose hair, trying to make out any sign of Celebrimbor’s features before looking at him properly once more, but Elrond’s hair was too thick and too dark to pick anything out. What was he supposed to be, but parts of his own body?

What did jolt Elrond back into looking into Celebrimbor’s face was the gentle warmth and pressure of a hand closing around his right hand, left hanging loose at his side.

Elrond took a breath. Took another one. Neither of those breaths were enough to put sufficient air into his lungs, neither of them enough to keep his head from spinning at the sudden contact.

It wasn’t as if he’d gone the whole time since coming to Lindon without being touched. There was the clap on the shoulder or the slap on the back, the arm around the shoulders of Thranduil trying to tempt Elrond into a glass of wine, the tap on his arm of Erestor trying to distract him away from something he was working on in the library with _another_ book he thought that Elrond might want to read, the reaching out of Galadriel’s gauntleted hand after she’d knocked Elrond to the ground during sparring, the gentle squeeze of Gil-galad’s hand on his shoulder when he came to find him after another missed meal. Elrond could hardly claim to have gone without touch for years on end.

Skin-on-skin contact was something else. Skin-on-skin contact was for Elros. More common when they had been children, when they had been together, when Elrond had thought they were inseparable and that they always would be, when he had never once imagined that they could walk down such drastically divergent paths that Elros would be a king in a foreign land, that their souls would face such different fates.

Skin-on-skin contact had been, once upon a time— It had been for Maglor, once upon a time, Maglor, who had woken Elrond from his nightmares, who had held him close and stroked his hair and dried his tears and promised uselessly that it would all be alright. Maglor could promise him nothing and they had both known it, even when Elrond was a little child, but he had promised anyways, and Elrond had let him.

(Maedhros had touched him and Elros but rarely, and always with the air like a man who was certain that if he applied more than even the barest pressure, what he touched would shatter like brittle glass beneath his hand. Elrond could no longer remember the quality of his mother’s touch. He could not remember his father at all.)

Elros was far away, and Elrond saw him but rarely, on the occasions when Gil-galad could spare him for a few months. Maglor was—

It had been a while since Elrond had last felt a hand on his bare skin.

Celebrimbor’s hand was as heavily callused as Elrond would have expected a smith’s hand to be, even a smith who likely wore heavy gloves whenever he went about his work. There was a patch of skin on his palm that was very smooth against the back of Elrond’s hand—a burn scar, maybe, for there was no other explanation that Elrond could think of for such a smooth patch of skin in the midst of all of the other calluses. The fingers that curled around Elrond’s fingers gripped loosely and gently, the pressure upon his skin only a ghost of what it could have been, only a ghost of the other times other people had taken Elrond’s hand, when there had been people who would take Elrond’s hand.

He wanted to yank his hand away. He wanted to stretch his fingers and curl them across the broad back of Celebrimbor’s hand, to see if the back of his hand would have calluses or burn scars, to see if Celebrimbor would pull his hand away, or if he would tighten his grip and hold on. Elrond wanted so many things that made little sense to him. That his wants now were contradictory were the least surprising of all of this.

Celebrimbor smiled up at him. “Thank you,” he said softly.

“I-I,” Elrond said, then stopped. His face was growing hot and his mind did not want to work, thoughts coming out in jumbled clumps that felt turned inside-out, his left hand clamping down tightly around the brass candle holder.

This, too, he could easily have believed to be a dream. If Elrond hadn’t felt his pulse throbbing in his fingertips, he thought he could easily have consigned this to the hazy phantasm-world of dreams, when Anor came over the mountains and banished all dreams from the world. (He did not think that would have been enough to make him forget it.)

Finally, Elrond’s thoughts unspooled enough for him to manage a simple, “What was the dream about?”

Celebrimbor’s smile did not flicker, but somehow, Elrond looked at him and felt as if he had just watched Celebrimbor put a mask up over his face. It was in his eyes, his pale eyes, gentle and bright and utterly, utterly opaque, the opacity spreading out to his skin.

“I don’t remember,” Celebrimbor told him, and Elrond was certain that it was a lie.

Elrond shook his hand free of Celebrimbor’s. He half-feared, half-wanted Celebrimbor to tighten his grip, to resist the breaking of contact, to pull him back in and pull him closer—it had been so long since he had last been touched this way; he’d not realized how much he missed it until he ached for it and ached all the more painfully for the prospect of the loss—but he was able to slip his hand out of Celebrimbor’s with no difficulty. Celebrimbor did not try to stop him. Celebrimbor did not try to re-establish contact.

“Put the candle out, Elrond. We must away to the quays early in the morning, and it will do us both ill to have slept so little during the night.”

Putting out the candle, that Elrond would do readily enough, if only to rid himself of the greasy stink of burning tallow. But plunging himself into darkness did not make him feel anonymous, did not make him feel sheltered. He itched still for touch. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the whole world could tell, even in the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Anor** —the Sindarin name for the Sun  
>  **Edhil** —Elves (singular: Edhel) (Sindarin)  
>  **Ithil** —the Sindarin name for the Moon; of the Sun and the Moon, it is the elder of the two vessels, lit by Telperion’s last flower; in an early version of ‘Of the Sun and Moon and the Hiding of Valinor’ was said to be “the giver of visions” ( _The Lost Road_ 264). As this form is very similar to ‘Isil’, the Quenya form (which is likely to be its original form, as the vessel of the Moon was made in Aman), it is likely that ‘Ithil’ was adapted from ‘Isil’; all I can suppose is that the Valar got in contact with Melian at some point during the First Age to share information.


	7. Chapter Seven

The morning dawned without the storm Elrond had feared. Indeed, in the scant few hours of sleep he had gotten after waking Celebrimbor from his mysterious— _purposely_ mysterious, and in the light of day, Elrond found again the wherewithal to be frustrated by that—nightmare, the clouds had completely vanished from the sky, leaving behind an early morning sky painted a pale, delicate turquoise (There he went with the precious stone comparisons again, and no, it did not feel any more comfortable now). It was a fine morning—a little breezy, but nothing experienced mariners couldn’t handle, and that would help the sails, anyways. It was perfect weather for sailing. If Elrond was the type to suppose such things, he might have supposed that this was a sign that the Rodyn supported the venture. Elrond was not the type, and he could only react in pleasure to his own good luck.

Celebrimbor woke out of the bed beside him. He did not look pale or overwrought after having spent the better part of the whole night locked in violent dreams. He looked a bit _strained_ , certainly, but no more than Elrond might have expected had he stayed up just a little too long working. Elrond couldn’t help but watch him with something approaching incredulity as Celebrimbor readied himself for the trip. When _he_ had nightmares, the stamp of them lingered on his face so long after waking that, back in Lindon, he had become grudgingly accustomed to people stealing glances at him if he was obliged to take breakfast in one of the dining halls rather than within the privacy of his own rooms. That Celebrimbor could just shrug it off, as though it was something of no import—

Celebrimbor was an increasingly confusing person. Perhaps Elrond should not have been surprised.

Elrond did not ask. He did not pry. He did not make suggestive remarks or fix suggestive looks to his face. Once Elrond realized that he had been gawking at Celebrimbor’s seemingly unaffected state, he jerked his eyes away, focusing stubbornly on his own preparations. He did not want—

Or maybe he did. But Elrond could not begin to guess at just what it was he _did_ want, jumbled and discordant as it was while it rattled about in the confines of his mind. Even the moments when it battered against the walls of his mind were only enough to give him the barest idea of the general shape of his wants.

He didn’t have _time_ to wrack his brains trying to figure out just what it was he wanted, anyways. The day wouldn’t last forever, and it would be better to be out on the water before the morning lengthened too much—Elrond was getting _three_ days on Tol Himling, and he would be damned if he did not make the most of it.

His hands were perhaps a bit clumsy on the laces of his boots. His sleep had been disrupted as well, even if not in the same way as Celebrimbor’s. That was only natural. Food and time would put his body fully into the waking world. His hands would be steady enough for a stylus once he was on the island. His eyes would be clear enough to see all that there was to see. His mind would be clear enough to comprehend all that there was for him to find.

This was really happening. That was the thought that crossed through Elrond’s mind as they left the inn. At his insistence and over Celebrimbor’s protests, they’d not stopped to sit down for breakfast in the common room, instead taking a handful of dumplings stuffed with quark to eat on the walk down to the quays. The inn would be looking after their horses in the meantime and Elrond supposed that it would have been better to sit for breakfast, if only to ensure they’d be in the good graces of the people responsible for their horses’ care while they were gone, but all roads led to the quays, all eyes looked towards the quays, and Elrond would not be content until Sea was something he held in his eyes, rather than simply a noise to clamor in his ears or a scent to linger in his nostrils.

This was really happening. Elrond’s stomach was churning as he bit into his dumpling, and the addition of food into the mix did _nothing_ to help on that front, though it did ease the lightness in his head. In just a few hours, he would be standing in the ruins of Himring, in a place where no Edhil had set foot in in more than a hundred years. In just a few hours, he would be standing in the ruins of the last great fortress of the Edhil left standing, even if only in pieces, in Ennor. In just a few hours, he would be standing in what had once been the home of—

Elrond swallowed the rest of the dumpling, and contemplated the two he had remaining before folding closed the paper the server had wrapped them in. Maybe his stomach would stop churning once he was on the ship. Maybe once he had Tol Himling in his sight, his body would recognize the necessity for food as his mind already did, and his appetite would return enough to eat.

He hoped it would. This was the biggest opportunity he’d had since he had joined Gil-galad’s court, and if Elrond had to pass it up because he fainted as soon as he set foot on the shore of the island and Celebrimbor felt the need to take him back to the ship, Elrond wasn’t certain he could ever come back from that. Gil-galad would certainly never let him out of his sight again if Elrond gained a reputation for _fainting_ , on top of the reputation he was already saddled with, that of the kidnapped child. The idea of anyone ever taking him seriously again was one he would surely have to shelve, because if Celebrimbor let even one word slip of why it was the assignment had been cut short before Elrond could even _look_ at everything Himring had to offer, Elrond had little doubt he would instantly become the absolute laughingstock of the court.

Of course he was thinking of all of that now, when he was so close to the biggest opportunity he had had in all his time as part of the court. Of course he could not banish those sorts of thoughts from his mind. Elrond rolled his eyes as he stepped around a deep pothole in the middle of the road. He’d lived his life with his mind; by now, he liked to think he knew something of how it worked. Happy day as this might have been, of _course_ his mind wasn’t going to let him enjoy it without any shadows darkening the promised triumph.

This was happening, though. The biggest opportunity of his career as a loremaster-in-training. It was happening. And even if there was nothing left in Himring to be found, he could still—

No, he’d find something. Elrond remembered much of the fortress’s late master. He would not disgrace his memory—there was little grace left in that memory; Elrond could not bear to be the one who finally stripped the last crumbling vestiges away—by assuming that there would be nothing left to find in Himring but weather-beaten stone, that Maedhros had been so careless with the protections of his fortress that the Orcs would have just been able to spill in and carry off every last thing of any sort of value.

Maybe when he held one of those things in his hands, he would finally be able to—

Elrond yet had no idea why it was that Celebrimbor had agreed to accompany him to Tol Himling. Oh, the fact that Celebrimbor knew his way around the old fortress and the surrounding island, once hill, no doubt accounted for why Gil-galad had come to him. But there must have been others whom Gil-galad could have dug up, if he’d been determined enough to do so. Those among Maedhros and Maglor’s following who had stayed with them past the assault on Menegroth were not welcome in any city of the Edhil anywhere in Eriador, these days—even those who laid down their weapons in the Lisgardh or turned them against their masters were shunned, living houseless in the wild, if they lived at all. But those who had abandoned them before the Sons of Fëanor turned their swords upon newly-vulnerable Doriath, on the other hand?

It was a polite fiction that anyone who had fought for the Sons of Fëanor, any of the Sons of Fëanor, had no place in the court of the High King of the Ñoldor, nor in any court any Ñoldorin lord might ever care to create for themselves. It was a polite fiction, and one that should not ever be tested, not by anyone who cared at all for maintaining polite relations with the irritable, stinging, and considerably more numerous Sindar.

Beneath that polite fiction, Elrond knew that many of the craftsmen in Lindon had once plied their trade in Thargelion, or Himlad, or, yes, Himring. He did not know which of the craftsmen, exactly, and he had never made any effort to find out. Oh, certainly, Elrond was curious, but even Elrond understood that there were things more important than curiosity, and he understood also that it wasn’t the wisest thing in the world, to deliberately set out to alienate any number of skilled craftsmen. They lived quiet lives in Lindon, now. Never again would their works achieve the sort of acclaim they had earned for themselves in their past homes; the need for discretion and anonymity ensured that they would likely spend the next several centuries, if not the next several millennia, keeping their heads so low down that their foreheads were constantly streaked with dirt.

But they had lived in other places, once upon a time. They had sworn fealty to other men, once upon a time. And some of them had lived in Himring. Some of them could no doubt have been relied upon to know and remember secret passageways and passwords. Gil-galad could have called upon them, and could have sent Elrond and his potential other guide off on the assignment with discretion enough that no one would have seen the guide to make a connection between them and Himring and Himring’s erstwhile master.

Ah, but this was rather beside the point, was it not? Elrond could speculate all day on Gil-galad’s motives, and he would come away from that no closer to the answer to his real question: why had Celebrimbor agreed to Gil-galad’s request? Why had Celebrimbor agreed to be taken away from his forge for two weeks to accompany Elrond to a deserted island?

The mystery of it was only deepened by the way Celebrimbor acted as they made their way closer and closer to the quays. As with yesterday after they had made their way to the inn, Celebrimbor’s behavior was oddly subdued. Granted, Elrond had not yet had the opportunity to see what Celebrimbor fully unrestrained looked like, but he had been silent and strange and—

No, this hadn’t started in the town. It had started when they were still days away from here, when they had drawn so close to the Sea that there was no escaping its never-ending song. But the shape of it had become somewhat clearer to Elrond this morning, as he walked at Celebrimbor’s side, his gaze constantly drifting to his form, head slightly bowed and shoulders slightly slumped, his feet almost dragging against the ground at points, as if he wanted to just stand there and become rooted to the ground and never move any closer to the shores of the Sea than he already had.

Elrond watched him, watched him move ever closer to the ships, so clearly with no joy or enthusiasm in the motions of his body, even if a small, absent smile was affixed to his lips (a smile with no light in it, a smile so lightless that Elrond could see through it immediately) and he had voiced no protest within Elrond's hearing. And yes, that lack of protest had stood out to him. The idea that someone could have the reservations that Celebrimbor _clearly_ possessed and yet go on with no voiced protest was so foreign to him that the scene might as well have been presented to Elrond in one of the indecipherable languages of the Men who had broken away from both the Edain and the Easterlings who had served Morgoth in the First Age.

Why this behavior? Where did it come from? And whatever its explanation and whatever its source, why would Celebrimbor be willing to follow him this far if he couldn’t even walk down to the ship, couldn’t even take to the Sea, with the slightest sign of enthusiasm?

Perhaps being on the island itself would be enough to give him some of the enthusiasm he seemed now to be lacking. Considering Celebrimbor’s story yesterday, Elrond supposed it could simply have been the idea of a sea voyage, even a short one, that was putting him in such a mood. If you believed the Rodyn had it out for you to the point that them dragging your ship into the Sea wasn’t outside the realm of possibilities, Elrond could see how the idea of a sea voyage might not appeal to you. Elrond hoped that that was what it was. The idea of a problem that solved itself held an undeniable appeal.

Maybe Elrond could be that lucky. Somehow, he did not think he would be.

There wasn’t really much of a beach, here. A thin strip of rocky shore provided the location for the quays. There was no sand here, no sand for bones to be hiding under, no sand for anyone to lie on, no sand for anyone to flee down as they—

There wasn’t really much of a beach, here, and for that, Elrond supposed he should be grateful. Just judging by the descriptions of Himring Elrond had from all of the reports he had read, it did not sound like there would be much of a beach around Tol Himling, either. At least Elrond would not have to spend the days he dwelled on Tol Himling telling himself that what he heard on the wind was not the sound of singing.

Elrond recognized the sails of the ship soaring up towards the sky before he saw the rest of the ship, itself. They were colored with alternating green and golden stripes, uniquely of the admittedly not very many ships in the harbor. He slowed his pace, shifting the strap of his bag on his shoulder.

This had been, once upon a time, the shores of a lake within the domains of a house now dead, barring one member who had repudiated his father and his deeds, repudiated the rest of his family and his house by extension, and while Celebrimbor was acknowledged as a prince of the Ñoldor, Elrond had never heard him acknowledged as the head of the House of Fëanor. The waters that stretched out before them now covered what had once been vast plains of grass where horses ran wild and Edhil and Men could travel alone, unarmed, in reasonable safety.

Elrond stopped before the quays when they came before the water. The sky was the pale, delicate turquoise of a sky that tried to pretend that it had never known a cloud, and then, there was the water, turning that sky murky where it brushed up against it, far out against the western horizon. The Sea…

Elrond had known much of the Sea, had seen many of its moods (there were so many that he doubted he would ever see them all, even if he lingered on the shores of Ennor unto the breaking of the world), and he had never known it to have any pretensions. He had known the Sea, and sometimes that knowledge led him astray, but Elrond had never known the Sea to pretend its mood was anything other than what it was. When it was happy, it was a pretty, sparkling blue. When it was gripped with anger, that pretty blue turned turbulent, a gray that turned darker and darker and grayer and grayer, until there was no trace of blue left and the water trembled and roared so violently that Elrond was sometimes surprised that it did not sprout fangs and talons with which to pierce the hulls of ships and tear sailors limb from limb. The Sea must surely be impregnated with the rage of Ossë and Ulmo, with the furious grief of Uinen, for its moods could change so quickly that Elrond could not imagine aught but the moods of the Ainur being enough to be what empowered them.

He saw no sign of true rage in the waters, not today. There were still veins of blue to be found in the water, still the scintillating reflection of sunlight upon the water where the blue touched. So long as the Sea’s mood did not turn—and Elrond was aware that that was quite a _lot_ to hope for, having seen how changeable its moods could be—Elrond doubted that there would be a moment during the voyage to Tol Himling when he expected the water to touch him with the touch of cold, sharp steel. Perhaps the night would bring such a time, but when night fell, he would be safe on the island, likely sleeping within the shelter of the fortress that fire and Orcs and wind and Sea had been unable to efface from the earth. Elrond would not have to worry about the fury of the Sea within the shelter of Himring.

He had no real fear regarding the Sea’s mood, not at the moment. And yet, when Elrond came before the water, when his eyes locked upon it, he found he could not yet turn away from it.

There had been another time when he had stared at the Sea, eyes locked upon it, unable to look away, regardless of how terrible the images that burned themselves into his mind like a brand. The peaks of the Ered Luin had been deemed the only safe place by that time—perhaps the Rodyn had given their followers in the War of Wrath instructions on where to go to ride out the final destruction safely, but Elrond was _not_ part of any group the Rodyn had given any such instructions to, and in retrospect, he suspected that there were many, Edhil and Ainur alike, who would have considered it a very convenient solution to their problems if the party Elrond had been a part of had simply drowned beneath the encroaching waves.

Regardless of what others might have wished, Elrond and his companions that day had found a spot to safely watch as everything Elrond had ever known vanished into the maw of the hungry Sea. Beleriand had been crumbling for years, of course, bits and pieces of it dropping into the Sea, or else being swallowed up by hungry water. Elrond had been barely thirty when he heard tell of rumors of the Lisgardh drowning in saltwater, the reeds submerged so totally that their only fate was to rot in the cold, clammy embrace of the Sea. The house where Elrond and Elros had been born was now beneath the water, and sometimes…

Sometimes, Elrond wondered if the destruction of everything they had ever known might not have had something to do with why Elros had chosen the way he had.

He had asked, and Elros had demurred. He had demanded, and Elros had told him, gently, lovingly, but without any sign of giving way, that it was not his place to demand such things of him. They were brothers, they were twins, and there must yet be some things that they would never quite understand about the other. Elrond had never learned the answer, not in full, and the mystery of it only fueled the wild speculation of his mind.

Sometimes, he wondered about destruction. He wondered about the drowning, devouring destruction of Beleriand, the effacement from the earth of everything they had known and every place they had ever lived. He wondered about all of that, and he wondered about Elros. But as long as Elros was determined to keep his secrets, Elrond would never know for certain. His brother would never again be someone he fully recognized.

Elrond had stood upon the ledge and watched, long after everyone else had turned their faces away. He remembered the moment as if he was reliving it anew, every time it came back to mind. The wind had been murderous. All those who had been unable to witness the event for themselves might, Elrond suspected would speak only of the murderous intentions of the Sea and the earth that expelled Beleriand from its embrace. It would be an easy mistake to make; the wind had played no true, pivotal role in the destruction of the land that day.

But the wind had been murderous. It was as if Aran Einior had turned every last fiber of his power upon Beleriand and felt, at the same time, that the sum of Ulmo’s power was insufficient to carry the waters of the Sea across land that should not have belonged to it. The wind had perhaps not set _out_ to kill aught that it touched, but when Elrond stood against it, struggling to keep his balance, struggling to keep his feet on the ground, struggling to do anything that wasn’t cowering before its might, he could feel murderous intent in its every gust. The wind was not simply a tool of the Rodyn’s power; in that moment, the wind was something with a will of its own, and its hatred was so intense that Elrond could only be glad for his thick clothing, for his lightweight armor. The wind that battered against his body would have done him any amount of injuries, had it been given the opportunity.

He had stood there, and watched, defiant of the murderous wind. That day, the Sea had been a gray so deep it was nearly black, its darkness lightened only by the frothing white caps that topped its waves, and though Elrond stood too far away to know for sure, he had no doubt that there were many places where that white foam was tinged red with the blood of all those who had been unable to escape the torrent in time. Thick with fulminous clouds, the sky had made no lie of its mood, no lie of the state of the world which it looked down upon. The sky had been such a mottled gray-black, punctuated by fiery veins of lightning, that it would have been easy to mistake for the sky at night, veiled by clouds, had it not been for the glow of Anor, fiery and unconquered, as it inched towards the westernmost mouth of the Sea, glowing behind the veil of clouds.

By that time, most of what was left of Beleriand bore little resemblance to the green, verdant lands of the tales that would no doubt proliferate in future years. Of course, there was the example of Ard-galen, burned and defiled until the only name left that could have ever have begun to describe the ruin left behind was Anfauglith. In the last few couple of years of Beleriand before all of it was wrecked, Beleriand grew a markedly greater resemblance to Anfauglith than it did to Ard-galen—well, everything north of the Andram did, anyways, and it wasn’t exactly temperate south of the Andram, anyways. The forests were grown thin, for there were those who needed spear shafts and wood for bows and temporary shelters and ships, and there were those who hated trees and all that they represented, and destroyed them wherever they found them, malicious and undiscriminating in their malice.

Even when Elrond had been a child, born into ruin, prince of nothing, he had known green lands. The land as he had known it in the months before the destruction were lands of ash and desolation, fit for nothing but the vultures and the skinny, starving wolves who cracked burnt bones searching desperately for marrow. There had been a time when he had entertained dreams of the grass growing back and the trees and gardens that could be planted in lands whose borders could no longer be discerned for all the towns and cities and fortresses that had been destroyed. Elrond had had such dreams, once. Many of them would never have been able to sprout without being ground into the dust by ten thousand angry feet, even if Beleriand had lasted.

He had watched as the water came. He had watched as the water ate, and ate, and ate, as all the land tumbled down into its toothy, roaring embrace. Maedhros called from the mouth of the cave for him to come away from the ledge. Elros ran to him and tried to pull him away by his elbow. Maglor came soon after and set his hands on Elrond’s shoulders, before resorting to looping his arms around Elrond’s waist and hefting him up into his arms when the water approached the ledge.

Maglor’s arms shook as he folded Elrond tightly against his chest. “Don’t look, my dear,” he said, having to lean down so that his mouth was directly above Elrond’s ear to make his voice heard at all over the wind that was so determined to strip all other noise from the world. The wind stripped all tone from his voice, but there was no mistaking how it trembled. He pressed a hand to Elrond’s head, combing quivering fingers through his hair. “Don’t look.”

He had looked, though. Before Maglor turned away from the ledge, shielding Elrond from the wind as much as his skinny, shrunken frame could manage. His last sight before he was taken to the shelter of the cave was of the last high peaks of Beleriand within his sight drowning beneath a single, towering wave the color of smoke rising from a brush fire.

Elrond had never felt as small as he had when he had looked out upon the expanse of water. He had never felt as small again since.

Years ago, the Sea had come up at the behest of the Rodyn and swallowed a land ruined by war. Now, only remnants were left behind, places so high that the waters could not swallow them, though they might batter at their roots and their walls in trying. This was what Elrond put himself into the power of on this day.

With that sobering thought in mind, Elrond turned to Celebrimbor, who was staring out on the Sea with an expression Elrond thought must be about as cheerful as his own, but the quality of which was…

It could not possibly have been the same. At the very least, Elrond did not think that there was any nausea involved in his own. Tentatively, he reached out, put a hand on Celebrimbor’s arm. The muscles of his arm felt taut, almost strained, beneath the layers of cloth separating his skin from Elrond’s hand. “You don’t experience seasickness, do you?” Elrond asked, trying for lightness, though coming from him, the attempt was about as lame as a horse that had known nothing but warfare for ten years was likely to be.

However lame it might have been, it had the desired effect. Celebrimbor’s eyes cleared; he snorted indelicately. “No fear, Elrond.” He raised an eyebrow as he looked Elrond up and down. “You might have a care for yourself, though. This will be your first time on such a ship as the one we’re journeying in today, won’t it? It won’t be like your trips to Elenna in those larger ships. You never know how you might react.”

“I _think_ I will be fine,” Elrond replied tartly.

He was the son of Eärendil the mariner. Elrond had never known his father as anything more than a figure out of tales, but he _was_ Eärendil’s son, and his blood must count for something. If it counted for anything at all, let it mean that seasickness would never touch him. He wasn’t asking for _too_ much to ask for that, surely.

“We shall see!”

And Elrond told himself to ignore the strained note in Celebrimbor’s voice, rending every attempt at lightness into shreds. He would have the story out of him eventually. Just… Not now. Not here.

-0-0-0-

Once out at Sea, Elrond’s reasonable confidence that the Sea would not be swallowing them today withered into something more like _mild_ confidence. It was easy to be confident of the Sea when you weren’t on it, and you weren’t in its power, and though Elrond had yet to feel seasickness touch him, in spite of the waters tossing the ship none-too-gently, Celebrimbor had raised a point that Elrond _wished_ was less valid than what it was.

The ships that left Mithlond to make the long journey to Elenna were considerably larger and more luxuriously-appointed than the much smaller ship (Elrond thought it might be a fishing boat, though he wasn’t quite sure; he would have thought the smell of fish would be considerably stronger, even if there weren’t any fish currently _on_ the ship) he was on at the moment. Those ships were the finest craftsmanship the shipwrights of the kingdom of the Ñoldor had to offer, their construction overseen by Círdan himself—in some cases, Círdan had come out onto the scaffolding and helped construct the ships himself. Elrond had never heard of any of them sinking. Perhaps it was because the Falathrim had constructed them and not the Ñoldor—the Falathrim were beloved of Ossë and Uinen and between the two of them, Elrond doubted any child of the Falathrim was going to meet their deaths by drowning _any_ time soon.

Elrond had no idea who had constructed this ship. The sailors manning it were clearly Sindar, but the dialects they spoke were mixed. He supposed it was only a matter of time before the Mithrim and Falathrim dialects collapsed into one amalgamation in any community where Mithrim and Falathrim Sindar lived together, but as it stood, the two dialects were yet clearly distinguishable from each other on _this_ ship. Elrond wasn’t certain if the fact that he had been taught to speak _Iathrim_ Sindarin had anything to do with it, but really, he’d had much experience of both dialects, and once you stopped to listen to a speaker, it wouldn’t be long before you could pick out just what dialect they were using. He was hearing both, here, and he could not say which side had been responsible for the ship.

Well, even if the Mithrim Sindar were not in so high a degree of favor with Ossë and Uinen as the Falathrim were, they at least enjoyed better than the cool, standoffish détente now put in place between the Exiles and the Ainur. Unless something stoked Ossë’s wrath to a blistering boil, Elrond hoped he could put his faith into that keeping him from drowning today.

Elrond winced as an especially rough wave battered against the port hull of the ship, making him stumble as he made his way towards the prow of the ship. He would _not_ be drowning today. Whether or not the was particularly _dry_ by the time the day was done would be another matter.

Celebrimbor had taken up a position in the prow of the ship just after they had set out from the quays. At the time, he had claimed he wanted to be somewhere out of the way while the sailors were getting affairs underway, and that much, Elrond could well believe; he’d never heard any tales of Celebrimbor learning any of a sailor’s arts, and in that case, the best place to be was, well, out of the way. Elrond himself had taken refuge in the galley, holding his pack on his lap while listening to barely-intelligible commands and shouts and the occasional whoops of laughter. But once he was confident that the ship was out of the harbor and onto open sea, he had quit his waiting spot and taken the opportunity to stretch his legs before the no-doubt _copious_ amounts of climbing he would have to engage in once they reached Tol Himling.

Celebrimbor, on the other hand, had gone to the prow of the ship and _stayed_ there. Though Elrond of course could not be certain—there were a few small portholes in the galley, but it wasn’t as if they looked out on the deck—he did not think Celebrimbor had moved the whole time. Elrond…

The questions were still a concern. The questions should have been a larger concern than they were. Elrond was having a hard time remembering _why_ they were such a large concern, as of late, when he saw Celebrimbor behaving this way. Though they had interacted but rarely back in the capital, Elrond had had more than a few opportunities to observe him, and…

He’d gone on long enough thinking about how strange Celebrimbor’s behavior was. They’d be at the island soon. If it was possible to get any answers out of him, Elrond needed to _try_ now.

Of course, Elrond had not considered what else he would find as he approached the prow of the ship.

Tol Himling was not visible from the shoreline. Not that Elrond had spent much time trying to spot it while he was in the port, but he had scanned the horizon at least once, and he had seen no sign of a landmass anywhere. The Sea guarded its secrets jealously; Elrond did not think he had ever known it to be particularly _reasonable_ where things it had wanted, and failed, to devour were concerned.

He could see it now.

Perhaps there had been a time when there was vegetation growing on the sides of the hill. Hill? Yes, Elrond supposed that was technically the right word for it. It was rather smaller than the mountains of the Ered Luin. It was not a mountain. But looking at it for the first time, Elrond was not certain that ‘hill’ was the right word for the island that had once been one of the most important fortresses of Beleriand in the First Age. The roots of Himring were now deep under water, and yet the island soared high above the surface, dark and crude and towering. Unconquered, yet.

In times now long gone, Beleriand had been a green place, and perhaps the sides of the hill had themselves been green with grass and scraggly bushes and squat, stubborn trees. But they would have grown in a place that was far from the Sea, and the saltwater would have poisoned them long ago, if they were not slain by smoke and fire before then. Now, what was left was unyielding stone, darkened by constant assaults by a hungry Sea.

And atop that place that was too small to be a mountain, too tall by far to be a simple hill, and looking nothing like what Elrond would have expected from an island, Elrond espied the craggy ruins of what had once been Himring, its many towers stretching up towards the roof of the sky like fingers on a scarred, battered hand. In one moment, Elrond thought they looked as if they were reaching up in supplication. In another, the image shifted, and the gesture seemed one of defiance instead.

Supplication and defiance. The union of such things suited it well, from what Elrond had known of its former master.

They would have to stop short of the island itself. Elrond had heard the sailors talking amongst themselves—the water barely covered what had once been the smaller hills surrounding the Hill of Himring, and more than one ship had wrecked on those hills in their time. Well, that was what the rowboats on the side of the ship were for, and Elrond had already known there would be some rowing involved in getting to the island; there was no harbor here for ships, after all.

They would have to stop short of the island itself, but they still had a-ways to go before it would be the rowboat and the rowing. Celebrimbor _could_ find something to do that wasn’t standing in the prow, staring at their destination, and yet, here he had stayed, possibly unmoving since the ship had first left the dock behind.

“Celebrimbor?” Elrond called out at last, as he drew close enough to be confident that his voice would be heard over rush of water trying to spill over the sides of the ship into the deck. He winced as stinging spray struck against him, harsher than anything he had ever experienced when making a Rodyn-blessed trip to Elenna. Celebrimbor must have been absolutely soaked by now, if he had been standing in the prow for the whole time. He reached out, pressing a hand to Celebrimbor’s shoulder, and sure enough, moisture quickly bled from the cloth and into his skin. “Celebrimbor, what is it?”

Slowly, so slowly, like the turning of stone against the onslaught of the wind, Celebrimbor turned back to look at him. His face dripped with water, tightly-braided hair gleaming with it. His cheeks were chapped from the wind, but his eyes were as calm and as flat as if they stood on solid ground. “Elrond?” he asked softly. “Do you know much of the Dagor Bragollach?”

Elrond snorted. “What sort of a question is _that_?”

Celebrimbor nodded, offering him a small, apologetic smile, a thin gleam of light that failed to offer up any light that could compete with the light that Anor poured down upon them both. “I don’t mean to insult you, Elrond. It’s not a chapter in history that many wish to revisit; I only wished to make certain before speaking. The winters had been—“ he was still turned towards Elrond, but his gaze was drifting back out to the Sea, back out to the slowly-approaching island “—the winters for the past several years had been so _quiet_ ,” he choked out, his face suddenly contorting in a torrent of emotions that passed too quickly for Elrond to pinpoint any of them, but his eyes were so very bright now, and Elrond had the sinking feeling that it had little to do with reflected sunlight or seawater. “Maglor usually had _something_ to deal with in the winter, skirmishes or raiding parties by Orcs determined to win their master’s favor by killing or capturing a prince of the Ñoldor for his pleasure. His lands were difficult to defend and my uncle had no permanent base there; he was often on the move. Maedhros would reinforce him in such cases, and there were times when we would ride from Himlad to reinforce him as well. Such had it been for more years than I care to count.

“But for the last ten years or so before the Bragollach, there were no skirmishes, no incursions by the raiding parties.” Celebrimbor’s mouth twisted. “We should have seen the sign for what it was, an early warning of the attack that was to come; I sometimes wonder at the decisions Morgoth and his lieutenants made during the Siege, but in this case I wonder at _us_ , for not realizing that he was trying to build his strength as much as he could before pouring fire down upon us.” Celebrimbor squeezed his eyes shut, pressing his mouth tightly together. “It would have saved us all a great deal of grief if we had at least _suspected_ something. If we had suspected something, we could have prepared, tried to form some sort of countermeasure…”

In the absence of anything else he could do, Elrond reached out once more, pressing a tentative hand to Celebrimbor’s arm, before the intimacy of such a gesture, out in the light of day, seared against his mind too painfully and he had to let his hand drop away. In the absence of anything else he could _say_ , he said awkwardly, more a verbal stumble than anything else: “I… I doubt there was much you _could_ have done.”

Fair enough, it wasn’t a chapter in history that most cared to revisit—especially not those who had lived through it. (There were plenty such chapters in the history of the Edhil, and Elrond could only wonder how many more such chapters would be written before his time in Ennor was done.) But it was a chapter vital in their history, nonetheless, and Elrond had learned of it all he could. He had learned of it what he could, and though he might never have seen it himself, rivers of fire were still an occasional feature of his dreams.

(He wondered, sometimes, if anyone had looked at the charred plains of what had once been Ard-galen and felt as he did when he looked upon the Sea. There must have been _someone_ , somewhere, who had. But Elrond could not find them.)

Celebrimbor’s mouth twisted bitterly. “Perhaps. I was in Himlad with my father and my uncle Celegorm when the north was set ablaze. The first tiding of it was the glow that came from over the edge of the horizon, past the cage of the mountains. I could well have believed it to be Anor rising over the horizon. But the hour was yet too early, and—“ he wavered, before rallying “—and the glow was coming from the north.

“The wind carried smoke to us, and the fire was upon us soon enough. There was—“ Celebrimbor swallowed hard. When he spoke again, it was to say, only faintly, “There was no chance of putting out the fire, no chance of digging trenches to try to slow its approach. There was nothing to do but flee.

“As terrible as the fires were, they could not climb all the way up the hill to the fortress itself. The hill of Himring was an island again in those days. But we could not seek shelter there. There were tunnels in Thargelion and the Gap that ran to Himring, but none in Himlad—as careful as my uncle was, Himlad was _south_ of Himring, and no one had ever thought we would need to seek Himring by way of any such tunnels.

“Between us and Himring there raged a sea of fire that grew larger with each passing minute, devouring miles of grass and trees with terrible hunger. We fled,” Celebrimbor said softly. “We fled, finding no succor on the borders of Doriath. They lost many trees and many march-wardens of their own, that winter, and good riddance,” he muttered, looking away from Elrond as an expression of intense bitterness darkened his face. “The Laegrim would not take us, but this we marked less, for they had troubles of their own. We fled south, then west, then north again, until finally we came to the first safe place that would admit us. I do not know how long Ard-galen burned before finally all that was left was choking dust, but plumes of smoke darkened the air for months on end afterwards. I never returned to Himring, afterwards. There were no safe roads.”

Elrond stared out at the dark shape carving the sky like a jagged tooth. Wind and sea-spray battered him mercilessly, cutting with the gnawing hunger of winter in spite of the summer season. “So, the last time you visited Himring was—“

“Long before the Bragollach, yes. Elrond.” Celebrimbor clapped a hand on his shoulder. He stared intently into Elrond’s face. “I doubt my uncle made too many changes to the fortress between then and the Nirnaeth. But still. We may not find the fortress entirely as I remember. If my passwords no longer work, are you prepared for that?”

Elrond set his jaw. “I’m _prepared_ to climb up the side of the hill with my bare hands.”

A jittery laugh jarred from Celebrimbor’s mouth, made all the more wobbly by the ship rattling under their feet. “Oh? In that case, you’ll be doing it by yourself, for I am _certainly_ not.”

Celebrimbor hugged himself, swallowing hard as he glanced back towards the island. He swayed a little on his feet. If Elrond didn’t know better, and perhaps he didn’t, he would have thought Celebrimbor really was sick, in spite of his earlier protests.

Here was the moment. And Elrond thought he knew what to ask.

“Celebrimbor?” Celebrimbor swayed a little more, and Elrond moved forward, his body acting almost of its own accord, to put his hands on Celebrimbor’s arms, trying to steady him. He did not know how well it would have worked had Celebrimbor really been ready to pitch over the side of the ship—Celebrimbor was bigger enough than him that it could well have sent them both tumbling down into the water—but as it was, it seemed to do the trick. Celebrimbor’s head was bowed, chin tucked nearly flush against his chest, and Elrond tilted his head to get a better look at his face. “Celebrimbor, do you… do you really want to be here?” he asked uncertainly.

Celebrimbor did not respond to him at first. He took a few ragged breaths, visibly essaying to steady himself. The wind and the Sea battered against them both, pelting water into Elrond’s sides that struck him with such source that he would have thought he was being hit with hailstones. Eventually, a large, scarred and callused hand reached up, pressing itself against Elrond’s right hand, still braced on Celebrimbor’s arm. It was Elrond’s turn to try and fail to stifle a jittery laugh, heart suddenly throbbing in his chest, but this time, he did not take his hand away.

Upon lifting his head, Celebrimbor smiled without joy. “What I want does not particularly matter, Elrond. We will be there soon.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Aran Einior** —Manwë
> 
>  **Anor** —the Sindarin name for the Sun  
>  **Edhil** —Elves (singular: Edhel) (Sindarin)  
>  **Elenna** —‘Starwards’ (Quenya); a name of Númenor, derived from the guidance of Eärendil given to the Edain on their initial voyage to Númenor at the beginning of the Second Age  
>  **Ennor** —Middle-Earth (Sindarin)  
>  **Ered Luin** —“The Blue Mountains” (Sindarin); the mountain range at the far western border of Eriador, that in the Years of the Trees and the First Age served as the border between Eriador and Beleriand. It was also known as the Ered Lindon, the Mountains of the Land of the Singers, Lindon being a name given to the region of the Ossiriand by the Ñoldor, derived from the Nandorin Lindānā.  
>  **Falathrim** —‘People of the foaming shore’ (Sindarin) or ‘Coast people’ (Sindarin); the Sindar of the Havens of the Falas in Beleriand; Círdan’s people.  
>  **Iathrim** —the Sindar of Doriath  
>  **Laegrim** —the Green-Elves of Ossiriand (singular: Laegel) (plural: Laegil; Laegrim is class-plural term); the division of the Nandor who followed Denethor, son of Lenwë; the name was imposed upon them by the Sindar, because of the lush forests of their land, because of their especial love for the forests and waters of their land, and because the Laegrim often dressed in green as camouflage  
>  **Lisgardh** —A marshy region by the Mouths of Sirion, a land of reeds that grow man-high and dense as a forest. Its name in earlier drafts was ‘Arlisgion,’ translated in The Book of Lost Tales 2 as “the place of reeds” (155).  
>  **Rodyn** —Valar (singular: Rodon) (Sindarin): a common Sindarin name for the Valar


	8. Chapter Eight

Fishing vessel the ship might or might not have been, it was fast, and the winds favored them that day. The ship had set out from the quays perhaps half an hour after sunrise, and now, an hour after midday, Tol Himling loomed so large out of the waters before them that the ship dropped anchor, unwilling to go any further and risk the rocks.

The captain hurried over to Celebrimbor and Elrond for a few words before they left. “Be wary of the rocks,” he advised, having to shout to make himself heard over the now nearly-deafening wind. “They’ll rip the hull of your boat from stem to stern in a heartbeat if you’re not careful.”

Celebrimbor stared out at the waters, as if searching for those rocks—for the stony tips of what once were hills—leaving Elrond to nod at the captain, a weather-beaten, dark-haired man beginning to show signs of stubble on his jaw (How old _was_ he?). “We will take care,” he promised. Elrond could swim, but he did not fancy his chances at swimming all the way to Tol Himling itself with his pack strapped to his back, especially not at the distance the ship had stopped. Besides that, it would reflect poorly if they got someone’s boat destroyed while out on assignment for Gil-galad.

“I will honor our agreement,” the captain went on. “After three days have passed after this one, my ship will return for you. Look for us on the horizon.” He looked towards Tol Himling, brow furrowed. “And whatever it is that you seek there, I wish you good luck in finding it.”

Elrond nodded crisply. “Thank you, captain.”

But the captain was not done. He caught Elrond’s shoulder as he was preparing to climb down into the rowboat, taking him aside. “And be careful at night,” he muttered, having to stand entirely too close to Elrond for his comfort to make his voice audible to him, and yet inaudible to any of the sailors standing nearby. “Few ships come so near to the island, but I’ve heard rumors in port from those who have. They say—“ something flashed in his gray eyes; whether uneasy skepticism or whole-hearted fear, Elrond could not say “—that strange lights can be seen on the island and in the surrounding waters, after night has fallen.”

Elrond searched his face, looking hard for any hint that the man might speak in jest, trying to spook two unwary travelers. Perhaps it was his own lack of familiarity with the man, but Elrond could find no hint of such at all. Slowly, he nodded. “We’ll be careful.” It did not pay to be unwary of where you went at night in an unfamiliar place, anyways.

By the time Elrond made his way to the rowboat, Celebrimbor was already inside, waiting for him. “I will row,” Celebrimbor told him firmly, before Elrond could even open his mouth, let alone offer otherwise. “You look out for any rocks in the water.”

 _‘It does not matter what I want_ ,’ rang in Elrond’s ears like a bell, a harsh, discordant bell with a cracked waist. He considered objecting. He’d never manned the oars in a rowboat before, and he could only guess how long it would be before his arms tried to put in their resignation, but he did consider objecting.

The consideration did not last long, before Elrond decided against it. Celebrimbor knew far better than him where they needed to go to find an access point up the seemingly sheer rock jutting out of the turbulent waters. All he could do was trust, and hope.

Elrond’s mild confidence that they would not drown this day shriveled to something barely recognizable as confidence at all roughly half a second after the rowboat hit the water. He had been in rowboats before, of course, but then, it had been on lakes and rivers, not such a chaotic mass of water as the Sea. Lakes and rivers were not _alive_ the way the Sea was, and they was _certainly_ not so capricious when it came to sailors. Every time the boat bobbed in the waters, he swallowed down on a thick, harsh noise rising out of the back of his throat.

His father had been a mariner of great renown, a mariner whose reputation eclipsed even Círdan’s. His father had sailed a flying ship into the heart of Angband and slain one of the most terrible monsters ever to darken the skies of this world. His mother had been a woman the Sea could not drown, a woman who, when the Sea enveloped her and tried to drag her down into its crushing embrace, turned into a bird and flew far, far away, the Sea unable to hold her, the water unable even to cling to her wings. His brother was a man who’d grown fascinated with sailing and ship-building, a king fast developing a reputation for himself as a ship-king, even a ship-king content to explore the boundaries of his own kingdom.

Elrond was not his parents. Elrond was not his _brother_. He felt far more tethered to the _earth_ than he felt comfortable in the Sea. The Sea had drowned the earth, once. The Sea could drown the earth again, if the Rodyn willed it. Elrond was tethered to the earth, but all that might mean would be that if the Sea came rushing hungrily up the vales and the hills once more, he would be unable to escape it quickly enough to save his own life.

“We’re not so far from where I want to stop,” Celebrimbor told him, as if Elrond had spoken his thoughts aloud. And Elrond’s mind was so disordered at the bobbing and rattling of the boat that perhaps, if Celebrimbor had gone skimming for surface thoughts, Elrond might not have noticed it. When Elrond turned his gaze away from the water to Celebrimbor, Celebrimbor was looking him over with a surprisingly calm, gentle expression, considering the amount of exertion that went into rowing the boat in such a turbulent Sea, considering the fact that Elrond was _quite_ certain that some of the moisture darkening his shirt was sweat, and not seawater. “There was a cave in the side of the hill that I was quite familiar with from my visits to Himring. The water hasn’t come up so high as to cover it. We’ll have to carry the boat up to it, but not very far—“ he took his left hand away from the oar long enough to rap his fist against the hull of the boat “—and between the two of us, this won’t be much of a burden.”

“The _wind_ may make it a burden,” Elrond muttered.

“We’ll be careful, and the wind will trouble us not. I’ll have to go around to the other side; the wind should be less powerful there.”

“Your optimism is less reassuring than you seem to think it to be,” Elrond informed him tartly, and while it might have been at least _partly_ down to Celebrimbor all but outright saying that he didn’t even want to _be here_ —and Elrond _still_ didn’t know what it was he was doing here, if he didn’t even want to be here in the first place—Elrond would be lying if he said he found Celebrimbor more compelling than the _Sea_. Celebrimbor was… Well, he was certainly _something_ , but all Edhil must inevitably pale before the Sea.

(It occurred only now to Elrond that now that he was out in the midst of it, surrounded on all sides by water, he could no longer hear the voice of the Sea. The Sea had never called to him particularly to start with, but he had never thought to find it absent in his ears when all that kept him from being enveloped in its many-armed and murderous embrace was a thin, fragile layer of wood. Would it be out of his ears on the island as well? Was it because there was water where there should have been none? Was it because even the Sea, heedless of all tears and pleas, understood that it should not have dwelled here? Or was there some other reason for it? Was it because Elrond should not have been out on the Sea? Or was there no reason for it at all?

Elrond could well have believed the Sea and its song to be a matter of mere chance. He had long since given up on any belief that the Sea was anything less than totally, _utterly_ capricious when not under the active and _tight_ control of Ulmo or Uinen—Ossë probably made it worse, honestly. But though Elrond could well believe it to be truly random, the thought was not comforting.

This was a new Age, and as much as there was to rebuild, Elrond was finding that there was even more to build _around_. He could only hope that in Elenna, Elros was not of late finding the Sea something he had to work around in order to build up a land where his chosen people could thrive.)

And to that, Celebrimbor rolled his eyes. “You would be far less reassured by my _pessimism_. Be glad I do not bring it to bear.”

“Is it really so terrible?”

Celebrimbor’s expression was yet mild, but there was a hint of something rather _less_ mild in his voice when he gave his retort: “Elrond, you would be amazed.”

Given the sort of life Elrond had led, Elrond could well have told Celebrimbor that _he_ would be amazed by the things Elrond wasn’t amazed by. Part of him wished to do just that. But his stomach was starting to churn, and he could not tell if the constant tossing of the water was finally beginning to affect him, or if there was some other cause for it. He kept his peace.

During the long, circuitous trip through the rocks, occasionally bumping against one when they came too close, but mercifully never suffering any _real_ damage to the boat, Elrond had the opportunity to get a good, long look at the sides of the island. From a distance, it had appeared utterly sheer, and almost perfectly smooth as well. For all his bravado, Elrond had not really rated too highly his chances of finding a way up on his own, not by climbing.

Now that Elrond was close enough to put the sides of what had once been the hill of Himring under more proper scrutiny, he could make out the quality of the stone much more clearly. It still appeared sheer. There were no gentle slopes, no embankments on the side of the hill that someone could have safely lied on. Instead, it was nearly all unforgiving, vertical plunge, hard angles that made Elrond wonder if this was truly the hill as Maedhros had found it. Had it been altered by the hands of Edhil, made all the more forbidding, the better to keep foes away from the massive fortress on the peak? Had the Sea and the wind and the terrible earthquakes done their work, chipping away at any softening influence that had once been present?

Perhaps the latter was true. (Though, given Maedhros’s attitude towards defense, Elrond could just as easily believe the former.) Perhaps the latter was true, for as Elrond drew closer in the rowboat, staring up at the stone with what he could only describe as wonder welling up in his chest, he could see that those sheer surfaces were not _smooth_.

The rough and weather-beaten remains of what were clearly once well-carved stairways crisscrossed the sides of the hill like jagged, puckered scars. They appeared at odd intervals, none of them connected to one another, or so it seemed to Elrond, who had never heard tell of this particular feature of Himring’s architecture. Some went on for only a few feet before terminating abruptly; others went on for as long as a quarter of a mile before disappearing into the stone. Elrond could see no signs of any doors or other openings that might have let in or issued forth those who would have walked on those stairways, clinging to the side of the hill and praying to whatever might yet be listening for steady feet.

“The doors are hidden in the rock,” Celebrimbor explained, upon fielding Elrond’s incredulous questions. “The Kasari taught us the tricks; they were—“ he sighed, a shadow darkening his face “—they were happier to share their secrets with the Eldar, in those days.”

Before Thingol tried to cheat some of their craftsmen out of payment, and all of the blood and grief that had followed from that, Elrond did not need to be told, his mood darkening as well. The Edhil were prone to lumping all of the Hadhodrim together, holding all responsible for wrongdoings inflicted by one, even if those being blamed had absolutely no relation to the wrongdoer. If the Hadhodrim were prone to regarding Edhil in the same fashion, perhaps that was fair. It wasn’t _nice_ , but Elrond could see how it might be fair.

“I hope we will be able to share secrets more readily, some day,” Celebrimbor said wistfully, shaking his head as he navigated the boat through a particularly tricky patch of rocks.

Elrond hoped so, as well. They all had enemies enough, without fighting also those who should have been their friends.

“Is that how we’ll be getting up to the top of the hill, then?” Elrond asked uncertainly, rather than dwell upon another way his forefather had left the world a worse-off place than he had found it. “Just… pop in and out of the hill itself?”

Elrond wasn’t certain how much he liked the sound of that. They would have a long, _long_ way to go, clinging to the side of the hill, praying that the wind did not blow them straight into the Sea and that the ground beneath their feet remained firm and that their feet did not betray them, while they were balancing heavy packs on their backs. Elrond had never had what anyone would call balance problems. But as strong as the wind was down here at the surface of the water, he could only imagine how terribly powerful it must be the further up they went up the side of the hill. Wind was the domain of Aran Einior, greatest and most powerful of the Rodyn. Elrond did not fancy the idea of pitting his own strength against _that_.

So it was with a strain of relief unfurling in his chest that Elrond watched Celebrimbor shake his head. “Oh, no. Those were only for the guards. We’ll have to go a little way up the stairway I’m looking for to reach the cave, but once we get inside of the hill, we’ll have a much easier time of it than if we tried to use those stairways.” Celebrimbor laughed ruefully. “I’m not even certain that those stairways go all the way up to the top of the hill; I think that after a certain point, the guards would have to take the same road we’ll be taking. But we’re almost there, and it will be easier just to show you.”

Sure enough, there was a stairway cut into the hill, just above the surface of the water on the far side of the hill. For Celebrimbor to remember this, to remember the exact location of the stairway and to correctly guess how close it would be to the surface of the water… Well, Elrond supposed he should not have expected anything less from one of the Calaquendi. Those who had dwelled in the light of the Trees had gifts that none of the Edhil who had been born in Ennor possessed themselves, no matter how great their own gifts; Elrond had spent enough time around Calaquendi to know that, even if the knowledge had come to him only grudgingly. And Celebrimbor himself…

Well, Celebrimbor might be a special case, even among Calaquendi. There was his own forefather, and there was him, himself. Elrond could well believe that Celebrimbor might be a special case.

Light the boat might have been, but between it and the oars, Elrond and Celebrimbor were left with clumsy, cumbersome work hauling the boat out of the water and into somewhere it would be sheltered during their stay. Celebrimbor was leading, and for that, Elrond was grateful, for he also thought that Celebrimbor might have been hauling the lion’s share of the weight of the boat on his back and shoulders, and Elrond thought he might have been better able to skirt the side of the hill when he was following, rather than leading.

 _I’d best hold on tight if we fall over the side,_ Elrond thought unsteadily as they made their way up and up—Celebrimbor had _claimed_ that it would not be a long walk, but when you had a boat on your shoulders and you were trying to keep hold of oars as well, _any_ walk was going to get long after the first five steps or so. _If I do that, I might be able to get out of this without drowning_.

“You’re going to _love_ the walk up to the top of the hill,” Celebrimbor remarked slyly.

“And what is _that_ supposed to mean?”

“Elrond, you’re gasping so loudly I can hear you over the wind. That’s not subtle.”

“This is a longer walk than you said it would be,” Elrond accused in response, at a loss for what else he could do to draw attention away from his gasping.

“I never said how long it would be,” Celebrimbor replied blithely. “And at any rate, we’re here. I’m going to turn left, gently. Be careful; I don’t want you falling over the side.”

It was with a considerably strengthened strain of relief taking hold of Elrond that they finally got in out of the wind, into a damp cave just barely tall enough for Celebrimbor to stand upright in, though that relief was somewhat tempered by the speed with which Celebrimbor hustled inside—Elrond could barely keep up. The air in the cave was oddly still, considering the wind howling outside. The air was choked with salt, and Elrond had to resist the urge to cough as he helped Celebrimbor haul the boat far enough away from the edge of the cave mouth that there was no chance that it could be blown out into the water. Given the attitude of the captain, Elrond was not at all confident that he would have sent people out to come get them once they returned here, if anything had happened to their boat.

“I’d like to eat lunch here, if you don’t mind,” Celebrimbor said once the boat was taken care of, and given the way he plopped down onto the damp ground, Elrond did not think he would have any luck convincing him otherwise. “The walk up to the peak isn’t as long as you’d think, but—“ he dug a parcel of travel rations out of his pack, opening it up without so much as a ‘would you care to join me?’ “—it’s not something you really want to try on an empty stomach.”

Much as Elrond was _not_ looking forward to yet another meal of travel rations, it wasn’t as if he had any better alternatives, being deprived of both a fishing spear and the means to make a fire. And if his guide wasn’t going to be going anywhere until after he’d eaten…

“A quick lunch, then,” Elrond muttered, sitting down at Celebrimbor’s side and digging out a packet of travel rations of his own.

“With food like this, I don’t know how we could have any other kind of lunch.”

Would that Elrond could have an imagination so blinkered in that regard. As he stared down at the ‘meal’ he had just unwrapped, consisting largely of rough, dark venison sausage and hardtack, Elrond suspected his lunch was going to be lasting a very long time indeed. One way or another.

It made him wonder what sort of feasts had been enjoyed in the halls of Himring, if feasts there had been. Maedhros as Elrond had known him had never been a man for feasts, but then, Maedhros had once been a very different man, indeed. The ghost of the man he had once been clung to him in ragged shadows, unspooling around his feet, so mangled and so distorted that Elrond was sometimes surprised not to see Maedhros trailing blood behind him. Maedhros had been a very different man, once—what Elrond had known was closer kin to a caricature or an effigy—and this had been the stronghold of one of the greatest princes of the Ñoldor. Many words and sentences and paragraphs had been spared for the role Himring played in the defense of the North against the aggression of Angband, but there had been many years of relative peace in which Himring yet stood. What had life been like here, in those years?

The Maedhros Elrond had known had so little appetite that Maglor had more than once had to force him to the table or the campfire and watch him with an expression torn between exasperation and despair (His eyes had been so bright with it, when normally, even the fiery eyes of the Calaquendi were dull in Maglor’s face. Elrond would see Maglor’s eyes go bright once again, at the end, would see those eyes shine bright as stars in the dark, before he never saw those eyes again. They had never been so bright when fixed upon Elrond and Elros’s faces, though the expression had been considerably less terrible). It was difficult to imagine Maedhros ever sitting at the head of the high table in any great hall and enjoying a feast, surrounded by kin and courtiers and comrades. But Elrond was hardly blind to how much the Edhil as a whole loved their feasts, and even ragged and tattered, Maedhros had been very keen on ensuring that Elrond and Elros understood properly the concept of ‘obligations,’ especially as they related to a ruler’s obligations to their people. Even if Maedhros as he had been then, prince of the Ñoldor and Lord of Himring, yet highly-esteemed among his own people, had not cared for feasting, it was easier to imagine him presiding over a feast, fulfilling his obligations to his people, even if doing so brought him little joy.

What sort of food would have been served at the feast? Elrond would admit that this particular line of speculation _might_ have something to do with the dissatisfying state of affairs regarding his _own_ present meal, but that was hardly enough to stop him fantasizing. The mind liked to wonder when it had nothing of any real import to focus on—Elrond’s did, anyways.

It was far enough north here, that unless the fortress was home to some very well-kept greenhouses—and while they certainly could have been present, Elrond had never heard tell of it, himself—that citrus fruits would probably have been difficult to come by. He couldn’t imagine Maedhros indulging in such frivolity as a greenhouse, not if there was a more practical use for the land the greenhouse was occupying. Given how brutal the winters were this far north—and they would have been yet more brutal when Morgoth still held some sway over Ennor—Maedhros would likely have deemed frivolous also all the trouble that would necessarily have to go into keeping the glass walls and roof of a greenhouse intact.

There were still so many things that grew this far north, still many things that could be raised and kept and cared for, still many things that could be hunted. Elrond was not yet so jaded as to be anything less than star-struck by every feast he sat before. He could imagine no way more eye-catching to display the wealth of a lord’s halls or the sheer generosity of their hospitality than a well-appointed feasting table. Visions of savory stew chock-full of pork and turnips and potatoes and parsnips and garlic, and sweet roasted apples and rich, soft bread served with cream danced through Elrond’s head. Following soon after were sweet cakes full of candied sugar plums and crisp summer salads and venison cooked with cinnamon and juniper berries and strong, hearty wine imported from the south. It all bore more than a slight resemblance to the spread put out on Gil-galad’s own feasting tables, but he had no other metric by which he could evaluate. It was that, or nothing.

Celebrimbor would have known. If he had ever had the misfortune to be caught in Himring in the midst of unseasonably early snows, it could well have been months before the roads were clear enough for him to return to Himlad or Nargothrond or whatever other place he might have lived in in the years of relative peace in the First Age. And even discounting such a scenario, it was unreasonable to assume that Celebrimbor had not had much experience of his uncle’s table. He would have known much of the bounty of Himring during the Long Peace.

Elrond’s mouth would not unstick enough to ask the questions. He was not certain why, but speculation, even on such a thing like this, felt less thorny than knowledge.

He did not want pictures painted to him of a happy, smiling lord and uncle gladly joining in with the festivities, did not want a picture painted to him of a stranger wearing the face of a man he had once known. He did not want a picture painted of meager, paltry feasts, the story of crop failures and famines even within the tranquility of the Long Peace. He did not want to know about singing and dancing, about whether the drinks served were imported wine or more local ale, did not want to be able to put a face to the faceless lord who presided over it all.

He did not want Celebrimbor to turn to him and ask, all innocent confusion, why it was that Elrond had not known all of this already, why it was that his head was not already full to bursting with tales of Himring. He did not want the flayed-open feeling that must inevitably accompany the reason why.

It was easier to regard this place as a ruin, as a potential treasure-trove, and not regard it from the perspective as a place that had once had anyone living in it, let alone anyone whom he had _known_. Easier, and perhaps less painful, but Elrond suspected his mind would stray back to familiar paths and familiar people before he was even all the way up to the peak.

There was something else he wanted from this place, besides the material secrets it held, besides the opportunities for advancement and for proving himself capable it represented. There were many things Elrond wanted from Himring, things that yet held no clear shape behind the walls of shadow in the back of his mind. It was better not to focus on them, better not to let himself grow distracted by all that could have drawn him away from the path he must walk in order to advance, in order to grow beyond the reputation of the kidnapped child.

Fine place to do that, in the former home of one of the men _responsible_ for that reputation in the first place.

But it was too late to turn back now, and whatever the thoughts that danced a raucous reel through Elrond’s mind, he still wanted this.

Besides him, Celebrimbor sighed, picking up a pebble and lobbing outside of the cave, into the fathomless waters beyond. “It’s strange seeing it like this,” he murmured, staring out upon the turbulent waters, gray and blue swirling together, never quite mingling and blending together in spite of the fact that it was all water, all made of the same materials, with no real difference between them. “Isn’t it?”

“I never came this far north,” Elrond said flatly. “I couldn’t tell you what it was like before.” And he would never be able to know what it could have been like. He did not think that even the most vivid of the dreams he grappled with when sleeping against a bed of earth would have been kind or cruel enough to show him such an image. They were _certainly_ cruel enough to taunt him with such an image, but they were not kind enough to give him even the faintest, most distant taste of all that he had lost to the desolation. They showed him nothing but the shattered world.

“But you’ve seen the Sea,” Celebrimbor gently pressed, peering suddenly into Elrond’s face.

His gaze was… Elrond felt his face grow warm, and he looked away.

“You’ve seen the Sea, Elrond,” Celebrimbor pressed again, refusing to give way. “You’ve seen what it has _done_ ,” he ground out, his gentle voice suddenly harshening to something that bore closer resemblance to the clash of a knife against a whetstone. “And you’ve seen what the land was like before the Sea was done with it. Even if you have never seen _this_ , you have seen _it._ ”

He took a deep breath through his nose, squeezing his eyes shut. Elrond watched him, not warily, exactly—he’d never known a _reason_ for why he should be wary of Celebrimbor, of all people, Celebrimbor who wouldn’t speak out on his own behalf even after someone had stabbed him, Celebrimbor who for as long as Elrond had known him had been unfailingly gentle and genial and utterly unlike the reputation of his famous and infamous family. But he did watch him with care, did watch him with close scrutiny, eyes raking over the tight line of Celebrimbor’s jaw and the tighter line of his lips. There was something about his face in the repressed passion of repressed anger that Elrond found oddly appealing. It displayed an intensity of character that he would never have suspected Celebrimbor of possessing back in Lindon, and watching it—

Just as Celebrimbor was trying to push his anger down, Elrond shoved those thoughts down, his skin prickling with some sensation that had accompanied the thoughts that he very much did _not_ want to think about. He ducked his head, letting loose strands of his hair fall over his face and praying that his inky black hair would be dark enough to obscure his face from Celebrimbor’s view. Elrond sucked in a breath of his own, fighting to keep it quiet enough that Celebrimbor wouldn’t be able to hear it over the wind, even if the noise of it was somewhat muted in the cave. He could not deal with that. Not now. Maybe not ever.

Mercifully, Celebrimbor had been too wrapped up in himself to notice anything going on with Elrond. He sat up straight, shaking his shoulders as if shaking off rainwater. “Forgive me,” he murmured, affixing a gentle smile that did not at all ring true to his mouth—it was the lack of light that did it, Elrond thought. “I see my emotions have run away with me.”

Elrond thought Celebrimbor could stand to let his emotions run away with him a little more, if he could ever learn to do it without letting _all_ of them run away with him at once. But he did not say that. Stones and glass houses, and all that.

“I found this cave when I was young,” Celebrimbor explained, a thin smile, genuine this time but still lightless—the combination of wistfulness and bitterness was one fit to suck the light out of any smile, even those of nearly-palpable sunlight like Celebrimbor’s smiles. “Himring was yet newly-wrought and it still held some secrets for the inhabitants. I would sit here for hours on days when I had no lessons or, once I was grown, on days when I had no duties. So long as my father or whichever one of my uncles knew where it was that I was going, they had no objection to it—well, so long as I did not draw too close to the edge, either; they did have _some_ limits.”

Elrond _did_ recall how quickly Celebrimbor had drawn away from the mouth of the cave when they had first made their way in here. Even with the lion’s share of the weight of the boat and oars on Celebrimbor’s shoulders rather than on Elrond’s own, it had been a struggle for Elrond to keep up by the end. At least _that_ was settled.

“I would bring some food for myself and a book I was reading, and just sit here out of the strongest of the sunlight and the wind. In summer, I was sheltered from the worst of the heat. In winter…” He tucked a stray strand of hair behind his ear. “Well, in winter, I came here little. But there were occasions when I wanted solitude, and though it was still bitterly cold, I was at least sheltered from the wind, provided I stayed towards the back of the cave.

“It really was better in summer. In summer, when the land was green, I could sit here without even looking at my book, just watching the wind blow over the hills and the plains.” Celebrimbor’s eyes glazed over. A water bead dripped down from the roof of the cave onto his face, dribbling down one of his cheeks, and he seemed not to notice. “Just miles and miles of long grass, the road north cutting through it like a snake slithering through. The air was so clear that I could spot riders the moment they appeared on the horizon; by the time they were a few miles away, I could make out their features with ease.” His mouth spasmed. “Sometimes, it would be Maglor or Caranthir. I would shout to them just to see if they could spot me in the cave.” A small, huffing sound like a laugh escaped his mouth. “Do you know, they _never_ could? They would always stop their horses and stare around themselves. They’d look so confused, I would have to laugh. If my aunt was with Maglor, she’d have to lean over and shake him before he kept on.”

Elrond could not imagine what sort of expression passed over his face at the mention of the woman who, had she lived a few decades more, could have been his foster-mother. He hoped he would never have occasion to catch sight of it in a mirror or in clear water—or in someone else’s eyes.

“It was a little too rugged for the liking of those bards and poets who like to go on about picturesque locations and the beauty of nature…” Celebrimbor punctuated his somewhat derisive tone with a roll of his eyes “…but it was beautiful. While it lasted, it was beautiful. You have never seen it, I know. But can you _imagine_ it?”

The Lisgardh had been a forest of reeds with few safe places on which to build houses and dwell. As young as Elrond had been when he and Elros quit that place forever, he _had_ heard the stories. Whether or not the stories of lights to be seen out in the reeds at night were true, the reports of tidal pools fit to suck full-grown Edhil and Men down into them and never let them go were taken seriously enough that Elrond and Elros were never allowed to stray beyond the borders of the settlement, even if they were given a relative amount of freedom within the settlement itself. The houses had been crude structures that were easily damaged by even the mildest of storms. The whole place had stank of brackish water and dead fish.

Sunlight and moonlight on the water glittered like diamonds and gold and silver and all the wealth that had once been the province of Elrond’s family—his mother’s, and his father’s—but had gone up in flames when their kingdoms were at last laid waste by their enemies. The roll of the Sea, then so gentle, then a friend rather than a threat, had lulled Elrond to sleep more times than he could count. Elwing had sometimes worn the Silmaril won by Lúthien and Beren under a thin, gauzy scarf, and she had glowed like she had a body made of light, only thinly disguised by a false veneer of flesh.

“Yes,” Elrond murmured, “I can imagine it.”

Celebrimbor sighed again, and clapped Elrond on the back, between his shoulder blades. “And now you want to stop imagining Himring, and see it for yourself, don’t you?” A sly gleam entered his eyes. “No, don’t bother denying it; I think I know you well enough by now. Come on. If we linger here much longer, you’ll only have a few hours of light left to explore today.”

Well, at least he wasn’t trying to pry. Elrond wasn’t yet ready to flay himself open for the gratification of Celebrimbor’s curiosity. Not quite yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Aran Einior** —Manwë
> 
>  **Calaquendi** —“Elves of the Light”; the Elves who came to Aman from Cuiviénen, or were born there, especially those born during the Years of the Trees and had born witness to their light; the Vanyar, the Ñoldor, and the Falmari (singular: Calaquendë) (Quenya)  
>  **Edhil** —Elves (singular: Edhel) (Sindarin)  
>  **Eldar** —‘People of the Stars’ (Quenya); a name first given to the Elves by Oromë when he found them by Cuiviénen, but later came to refer only to those who answered the summons to Aman and set out on the March, with those who chose to remain by Cuiviénen coming to be known as the Avari; the Eldar were composed of these groups: the Vanyar, Ñoldor (those among them who chose to go to Aman), and the Teleri (including their divisions: the Lindar, Falmari, Sindar and Nandor).  
>  **Elenna** —‘Starwards’ (Quenya); a name of Númenor, derived from the guidance of Eärendil given to the Edain on their initial voyage to Númenor at the beginning of the Second Age  
>  **Ennor** —Middle-Earth (Sindarin)  
>  **Hadhodrim** —a Sindarin name for the Dwarves, ultimately adapted from the Khuzdul  
>  **Kasari** —a common name for the Dwarves among the Noldor, adapted from the Khuzdul Khazâd (singular: Kasar) (Quenya)  
>  **Lisgardh** —A marshy region by the Mouths of Sirion, a land of reeds that grow man-high and dense as a forest. Its name in earlier drafts was ‘Arlisgion,’ translated in _The Book of Lost Tales 2_ as “the place of reeds” (155).  
>  **Rodyn** —Valar (singular: Rodon) (Sindarin): a common Sindarin name for the Valar


	9. Chapter Nine

There was an opening in the back of the cave, behind a fold in the wall, which had made it difficult at first for Elrond to spot. Celebrimbor paused before they stepped inside, drawing something wrapped in a length of thick, red wool from his bag.

“Is that…”

“I’ve had this with me since we fled Himlad,” Celebrimbor replied, ignoring the uneasy note tottering in Elrond’s voice and the twitching frown on his lips as he held the lamp aloft, crystal and steel, emitting a delicate blue glow that yet banished all shadow from the cave. “I thought it would serve us well here. We will find few light sources within the hill itself.”

For his own part, Elrond’s eyes stayed locked upon the lamp itself. It… it was a different shape than the ones he had known, spherical rather than the tapering octahedrons that had prevailed in Amon Ereb and the camps that followed after it. The quality of the light it gave off was just the same, and standing bathed in it, Elrond expected to hear Elros calling for him, expected to see Maedhros stepping out of the woods after his latest odd turn and subsequent insistence that he foray out alone, expected to feel Maglor’s hand set itself upon his shoulder.

They were reliable light sources, though. In all his time around them, Elrond had never seen anyone take one of the lamps apart to set a new flame within or renew the charms that kept them alight or do _anything_ in the name of maintaining them, and yet, on they burned. As far as Elrond knew, no one else had ever been able to replicate the feat.

“…As you say.”

And still, standing within the light it cast, Elrond felt as if the top layers of him had been abraded into bloody ruins, and what was left beneath, peering out through the wounds, that was—

Once they were within the hill, Elrond was grateful for the lamp, whatever memories it might ignite. It was as Celebrimbor said: within the bowels of Himring Hill, it was utterly dark without a light of your own, and _without_ that light, you had no chance of navigating up to the top of the hill itself. You would only wander on in the fathomless dark, until you took a wrong turn and went plummeting down, down, down.

“When my uncle ruled over these lands, things were different in here.”

Celebrimbor kept up a stream of cheerful, or seemingly cheerful—Elrond wasn’t certain how much he believed it, but he never got a good enough look at Celebrimbor’s face to try to discern deception—chatter as they fumbled through the dark. Elrond could count himself grateful for the chatter as well as the lamp, but it was not quite enough to completely dispel his disquiet as he followed after Celebrimbor through paths that, yes, he would not have been able to find on his own, and _yes_ , Gil-galad, he was beginning to see more clearly the need for a guide. Not that he hadn’t subconsciously understood the need since his first glimpse of Tol Himling itself, but he still hoped that Gil-galad wouldn’t be too obviously smug when Elrond made his report to him.

No, Celebrimbor’s chatter, while it helped, was not enough to give Elrond a full measure of peace. The lamp threw far greater amounts of light than anything else its size could have managed, but for a place so massive, that _still_ wasn’t very much. Elrond had the impression of standing in a vast cavern—Celebrimbor’s voice gave off a distinct echo, and Elrond had that dizzy feeling he often got when standing in a chamber whose ceiling soared so far away from the floor that he might as well have been standing under the sky itself—but he could not see clearly enough to know that for certain. It was easy to grow dizzy and disoriented in the damp, dripping dark—it was for Elrond, at any rate—and Celebrimbor’s chatter, while somewhat comforting, if only for the small measure of _grounding_ it provided, was not quite enough, not all by itself.

“When Maedhros yet dwelled in the halls above, there were a thousand lamps burning in this place, at all hours of the day and night. They burned so brightly that the only shadows that could live within the walls were those men brought with them, and even those were shriveled things that clung to boot soles like dried mud.”

“That does sound more practical,” Elrond muttered, as they started an ascent up a stone ramp, though this one was much, much broader than the stairways on the exterior of the hill, and it mercifully possessed _rails_.

 _If I ever live in halls of my own, all the staircases must have rails. There’s no reason to be clinging to the side of a wall for dear life._ Thinking back on his first sight of the stairways on the exterior of the hill-become-island, Elrond wondered if perhaps those guards who were made to use the stairways to get from… guard station?, guard station to guard station weren’t being punished for something. Unless there had once been rails and every single one of them had been knocked off in the intervening years between Himring’s abandonment and Elrond and Celebrimbor’s visit, and given _every_ last thing that had happened here, Elrond supposed that wasn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility, Elrond couldn’t really envision any other possibility. He certainly knew _he_ wouldn’t have sent guards out onto those stairways, given just how bad the wind could and often _did_ get, unless he was very, very angry with them.

…Perhaps he would leave that out of the report. He did not think the admission that he would send guards out into what he thought was serious peril if he was sufficiently angry with them would go over too well with Gil-galad. Even considering that Elrond had never been in a position to send guards anywhere and he didn’t know if he would _actually_ do it, he _really_ did not think that would go over too well.

He had to admit, though, there was an odd, vicious appeal to the idea. Elrond had known some guards and some soldiers whom he would have liked to put the fear of an untimely death into. Frankly, he thought they would have been better off for having that fear put into them. It might have taught them to place more value on the things of the living world, and to take less delight in the extinguishing of them.

But this wasn’t worth focusing on, not right now. Not when Elrond needed as much of his concentration as possible for keeping his footing and not becoming one with the hill, with the _island_ , for all time.

“Oh, it was!” Celebrimbor agreed, and this time, there was no mistaking it—that note of cheer was completely, obviously forced, and frankly, the forced quality of it made the cheer sound screechy and abrasive, like wearing chain mail against bare skin without even the thinnest of shirts to protect the skin from the chafing rings of steel. Elrond found himself bizarrely grateful for the gesture anyways, even though the act was wearing thin and Celebrimbor, who must have been able to _hear_ how grating his forced cheer was, wasn’t trying to drop it, even thought that would have been the _only_ graceful thing to do.

He couldn’t tell if Celebrimbor was doing it for his own benefit, or Elrond’s. He couldn’t tell how much the answer would have mattered to him.

“It was much more practical,” Celebrimbor was saying, the lamp bobbing on its chain as he made his way up the ramp. “And it…” Now, _now_ his cheer flagged a little bit, though his tone was less grating, as compensation. “It wasn’t nearly so _quiet_. Sound carried quite far in this place, and the acoustics were… Well, they were quite good for echoes. Not so good for having private conversations. If you were standing at one end of the cavern, you could hear someone talking about what they had had for lunch at the far end of the cavern. You might even be able to make out just from their tone whether they liked it or not. I… It was nice. I… I do wonder what became of those people, sometimes.”

At the edge of the glimmering blue sphere of light cast by the lamp, Elrond caught sight of something. He stared at it for a long moment, frowning, his mind not working fast enough to put together an idea of just what it was he was seeing. Given what it was he was seeing, that might have been purposeful on his mind’s part. His mind rarely granted him ignorance for the first few moments of a sight of something like, well, like _that_ , but there were always times when his mind chose to react in ways he did not expect.

You… You really wouldn’t expect to find driftwood in here, now would you? It was damp within the cavern, but you could only expect that, when the island was surrounded on all sides by Sea. This place was surrounded entirely by fathomless and fathomlessly hungry Sea, and it was inevitable that some amount of the water would get in. But Elrond did not think that it was possible that driftwood would be able to get in. Even if the waves rushed high up enough to find chinks in the stone, the odds of any driftwood carried on those waves getting through those chinks in the stone and finding their way down into the cavern…

Well, Elrond was no master of statistics and probability. Not yet. (He thought he might like to be, some day, once he found the time.) But he thought the odds must be long, indeed.

It couldn’t be driftwood he was seeing. Not here. That in mind, Elrond turned his gaze quickly away from it, and did not look back towards it. He could not change it, could not will it away, could not set any of it to rest, for the only place he knew to make it rest was within himself, and Elrond already had enough things that did not belong rattling inside without end. So he looked away, and did not look back towards what could not be driftwood.

“How longer will it be before we reach the surface?” he asked, in place of dwelling on that which would only rattle inside of him. “I would like to get started while we still have a reasonable amount of light.” There was nothing to say that Elrond could not do studies at night, at least on the ground levels, but even with Celebrimbor’s ancient and somewhat astonishing lamp, it would not have been the equal of daylight. Besides that, after his exertions today, Elrond had a feeling he was going to be too tired by nightfall to be doing much but sleeping—he was already feeling a bit winded.

“I’m not certain,” Celebrimbor admitted, and before Elrond could voice the _strenuous_ objections already forming on his tongue, he went on, “I could tell you how long it would have taken if this place was lit and dry, but now, it is neither of those things. We must take greater care, and we must move more slowly. I still think we’ll be up on the peak before sunset, but you may only have a few hours left over.” He glanced over his shoulder, smiling gently. “You’ll still have days after this, Elrond. That will be enough time for a preliminary inventory, especially with my help.”

“Perhaps,” Elrond told him stiffly, pressing his lips tightly together. “But I would like to make the _most_ of my time here. Let’s not dawdle when we don’t have to.”

Celebrimbor sighed. “If you say so, Elrond. But we’re coming to a section that will likely be difficult for us to traverse with just this lamp, when the paths have not been maintained and our footing will need to be sure. If you want to get past it at _all_ , let alone quickly, I need you to stay close to me. Holding onto me, preferably. I really should have thought to bring some rope,” he mused ruefully, “as mountain climbers have, so we could lash ourselves together. But in the absence of that, _please_ stay close.”

Elrond eyed his back, a feeling of great intensity and no name that he knew welling up suddenly inside of him. Well, he might have been able to guess at its kin, for the longer it brewed inside of him, the more uncomfortable and anticipatory he became. He did not, did not want…

What the mind did not want was one thing. Every other part of him was something else entirely.

Every other part of him being what was presently in charge, apparently, Elrond found that what the mind did and did not want was not enough of a concern to keep him from reaching forward.

In his defense, he was reaching for Celebrimbor’s _left_ hand rather than his right (though he couldn’t really have taken the right, considering that was the hand holding the lamp), Celebrimbor’s off-hand, and he was doing it with his own left hand, which was very much his off-hand. There was no mistaking it for anything else. Elrond had tried to learn how to write with his left hand a few times as a child, when he had been especially bored with nothing to do (life as itinerant vagabonds, living in constant threat of death, had been exceptionally stressful, yes, but in between those moments of exceptional stress, there had been quite a bit of boredom to contend with, and if there was anything Elrond had learned from those spates of boredom, it was that boredom was capable of breeding any amount of ill-advised ventures), and the results could only be called ‘legible’ if the observer was feeling especially generous. Being possessed of exceptional insight and the ability to decipher chicken-scratch certainly helped. Elrond was not left-handed. He was not what _anyone_ could call ambidextrous. He wasn’t so impractical as to reach out with his dominant hand.

But he had reached out, quickly, before he could convince himself not to. Celebrimbor had invited him to hold onto him, after all. Elrond could not see how Celebrimbor could find anything to complain about here, or so Elrond was telling himself almost feverishly, heart pounding in his chest as his fingers closed around Celebrimbor’s warm, damp skin. This was the best way, wasn’t it? If one of them slipped, it would be easier for the other to give aid if they were holding onto each other in a way that allowed them to try to right the other immediately. This was the best way. It was the best way. It was the only sensible way.

Elrond realized that he was holding Celebrimbor’s hand so tightly that he could feel Celebrimbor’s pulse under his skin. If one of them fell, and the alternative was tumbling over the side of a pathway into the dark and hungry and utterly unforgiving abyss, this was sensible as well. It was perfectly sensible. It was the only sensible thing to do.

Whether or not Celebrimbor shared that sentiment was a mystery to Elrond, at least for now. He stopped dead in his tracks the moment Elrond’s hand closed around his own, much larger one. He turned back, holding his lamp so that they were both bathed in the brightest ring of light cast by whatever it was that ignited the glow within its steel and crystal cage. Celebrimbor stared down at their twined hands, brow furrowed as if he did not know what to make of the contact—which was a _laugh_ , considering his behavior over the last few days—and could not guess how precisely he was supposed to react.

When Celebrimbor’s eyes snapped to Elrond’s face, Elrond met his gaze defiantly, refusing to flinch or back down. _If you did not want something like this_ , he could not quite will himself to say, _you should not have told me that you would be happiest if I was holding onto you._

Of course, this all felt a little like jumping off a cliff, the sick lurch of realizing that there was no ground beneath your feet and it was too late to turn back and get back on solid ground, that there would be no going back and you were just going to have to tumble through the air and let whatever you landed on do with you what it would. But at least in this case, Elrond had decided, however impulsively, to go jumping off of that cliff himself. He’d not been pushed.

Finally, Celebrimbor seemed to have found his tongue once more. “That’ll do it,” he remarked, as if there was nothing serious to it at all.

Elrond counted himself a little disappointed by that, though logically, he knew he shouldn’t have been.

-0-0-0-

Later, Elrond would count himself glad that the fact that Celebrimbor’s body was between him and the lamp meant that he could not see much of the space around them. The higher up they got, the narrower and less solid the path became. It made Elrond wonder if this was the ‘main entrance,’ such as it was. Himring had been an impenetrable fortress, yes, but once upon a time, it had also been the greatest city in the east of Beleriand, and there must have been any number of travelers coming in and out of the city on a regular basis. There must have been another way up to the top, and why Celebrimbor wasn’t using _that_ one, Elrond couldn’t begin to guess. He would have asked, but every time his patience waned and the question burned on the tip of his tongue, he would step on a loose patch of gravel and that energy was devoted instead to cursing under his breath, swallowing down on his heart which had lately shot up into his throat.

He’d get the information out of Celebrimbor once they were standing on solid ground once more. Once they were out in the fresh air again, it would be easy. It would be easy to—

Another patch of what Elrond _hoped_ had always been loose gravel, for if the ground had once been solid and was solid no more, that did not bode well for what he was likely to find as they went further up. Elrond had been forced to entertain the prospect that the damage wrought on the island would be great enough that he might not even been able to reach the fortress. That was frustrating enough on its own. However, if he was to find that the damage that kept him from reaching the fortress was located only against a strategically placed trapdoor or _wherever_ it was that Celebrimbor was taking him, and that they could get all the way to the top and then find their way irrevocably barred, if there was only the one obstacle and that, all by itself, was insurmountable…

Elrond doubted that _anyone_ would have acquitted themselves too well, in such a situation. Even those who claimed to be possessed of endless and eternal patience might have found that patience sorely tested. In Elrond’s case, he knew he would not have acquitted himself too well, and he did not see how anyone could truly blame him for it. But at the same time, if he found himself confronted with such a sore trial of his patience, he would be glad that there would only be the one witness to his reaction. With only one witness, Elrond thought he would have better luck convincing that witness not to spread the tales of his reaction too far.

Hopefully, Elrond wasn’t going to have to find out how he would have reacted if they found the way irrevocably barred, and any other roads they could have taken to the peak of the hill barred against them. His bloodline had not, in the end, been proven to possess _anything_ resembling good luck—yes, Doriath and Gondolin had both been glorious kingdoms while they lasted, but when they fell, their falls were so great and so terrible that the earth itself shook with the vibrations of the stones hitting the ground, the Doom of the Ñoldor sinking its claws into them both, even to Doriath, a place where no Ñoldo who could not claim close kinship to its king was allowed. He did wonder, sometimes, you know, wonder if the Doom was woven into his fate the way it had been woven into the fates of Gondolin and Doriath. He _did_ have Ñoldorin blood through his father, and if it could find its way to great and glorious and arrogant Doriath, a place that exulted in sterile purity and righteous hard-heartedness, surely the Doom could find its way to him.

Typically, the Doomsman’s curse manifested itself in more dramatic ways than simply a collapsed tunnel that presented not a blocked-off escape route for someone desperately fleeing a murderous foe, but a collapsed door for a frustrated traveler who would return to their home thwarted and without all that they had sought, but hardly the worse for wear. Typically, the Doomsman’s curse itself was _far_ more dramatic than that, or so Elrond had always been made to understand. The Doom of the Ñoldor was a creature that specialized in bringing down, well, _doom_. It operated on a level of death and destruction and the shattering of all your hopes and dreams in spectacular fashion. Frustrating a loremaster-in-training and a would-be explorer with a blocked-off passageway seemed a bit small-time, by comparison.

This venture would be beneath the Doom’s notice. So Elrond hoped.

Celebrimbor did not seem to have even considered the Doom—or perhaps he considered it constantly, and any consideration of it thus became little more than humming background noise in the back of his mind. He just kept on walking, not with the supreme confidence of someone who expected to find every path clear, but with the reasonable caution of someone who had not been here in quite some time, and who _knew_ that it was reasonable to assume that portions of the path had fallen into a state of disrepair in the meantime, but who nevertheless had a keen memory and expected to find much exactly as he remembered it. It was… Elrond thought he might have felt less sure if he was being guided by someone who presented themselves as the embodiment of supreme confidence. The idea that Celebrimbor wasn’t thinking about any obstacles or dangers would have made Elrond all the more aware of how precarious their situation was, just what could happen if one of them put a foot wrong, and how likely it was that anyone Gil-galad sent after them if they did not appear in their rowboat when the ship returned for them would find _anything_ left alive. This caution, however much it might have slowed their journey, had ceased to irritate Elrond once he considered what the alternative could have been, likely _would_ have been.

Elrond had not let go of Celebrimbor’s hand the whole time. They had creeped along some narrow passageways while making this latest long ascent, Celebrimbor counseling Elrond to step only where he had seen Celebrimbor put his own feet. Now, there could be a number of reasons for why he would give _that_ advice in particular, but when Elrond chanced a look at the side of the path Celebrimbor was cutting for them, he… He couldn’t actually see the ground. Sometimes the space where the ground should have been was empty on the left-hand side of them. Sometimes, it was on the right-hand side that the darkness yawned below them, so deceptive, so hungry. Celebrimbor held the lamp out before them, and with his body between the light and the spaces Elrond watched, it was impossible to tell for certain, but Elrond carried within him the sick certainty that if he had put his foot into any of those utterly dark places, he would never have found the ground, not until the ground opened up to swallow his body in the entirety.

He always had been more tethered to the earth than Elros, or either of their parents. Maybe the ground would be gentle with him. But somehow, Elrond thought that that was wishful thinking. The _Sea_ wasn’t gentle; his brother and his parents had had to conquer it to become masters over even a small part of it. If Elrond fell here, he had a feeling that the only conquering that was going to be happening was the conquering of the unyielding stone over his own fragile bones.

But Celebrimbor did not seem at all interested in letting the rock do any conquering over any of Elrond’s bones. His grip was not the almost violently tight squeeze that Elrond had adopted when first he had taken Celebrimbor’s hand in his own. It was not so tight that Elrond couldn’t feel the blood pulsing through his fingers, but Celebrimbor kept a firm grip on his hand, never letting go even for a moment. Elrond did wonder if Celebrimbor was strong enough to haul him back up if he fell over the side of a ledge, especially considering he would have to do so in such a way as to not risk the lamp—those lamps were incredibly sturdy, it was true, but Elrond was not entirely certain how well the lamp would fare if it fell hundreds of feet onto hard rock.

 _Now_ I _wish Celebrimbor had thought to bring enough rope for us to lash ourselves together_ , Elrond thought, struggling to restrain the wobbly grimace or smile—it was so hard to tell sometimes, and this was definitely one of those times—that threatened to break over his mouth. It would have been less comfortable, having a length of rope tied around his waist, but Elrond would perhaps have worried just a little less about what one of them was going to do if the other really did fall off a ledge, besides tumble down, down, down after them.

“We’re nearly there,” Celebrimbor called out. “I think I can see light up ahead.”

Elrond would have to take Celebrimbor’s word for it. The only light he could make out was the incandescent blue glow of the lamp Celebrimbor had brought with him. In the darkness, his eyes were inevitably going to be drawn to it, and the chances of even the keen eyes of the Eldar being able to make out light that must shine beyond the glow cast by that lamp, especially when even a single cloud passing over the face of Anor would have made the sunlight glow less brightly than this lamp.

But given the amount of time they had already spent climbing, he wanted to take Celebrimbor’s word for it. He wanted to believe that soon they would feel fresh air on their faces and Anor would shine down upon them and Elrond would smell something that wasn’t the rank smell of old, salty water trapped within a lightless stone cavern. He had ancestors who had been content to live underground in caves, and Elrond would concede that Menegroth in its glory had to be an experience totally alien to _this_. But Elrond didn’t think he had it in him to be a cave-dweller, and _yes_ , he knew that this was going rather against the whole idea of the name his mother had given him, but while mother-names were considered to possess a great deal of insight, no one ever said that insight had to be _correct_. He was tethered to the earth, but no one had ever said that that meant that Elrond had to spend his life _within_ the earth. He was perfectly content to be tethered to the earth and dwell upon its surface. He would sooner plant gardens than delve down towards the roots of mountains.

At first, the only light Elrond could see was the blue light of Celebrimbor’s lamp. But as they slowly edged further and further upwards, the shadows outside the light cast by the lamp grew less absolute. Elrond could make out his surroundings with less difficulty, could see the rippling white veins swimming through the gray stone that surrounded them, could see the holes that yawned out of the ground, opening only on dizzying darkness that Elrond dared not stare into for more than a moment—stare into it for more than a moment, and every moment after that just intensified the feeling of falling into that pure black until Elrond felt as if the very world around him was swaying, trying to topple him over.

And as they moved on away from those holes in the ground, as they walked on upwards, Elrond could finally see the light that Celebrimbor had remarked upon. After an unknown amount of time with only the blue light of the lamp to see by, the colorless light Anor spread over the world seemed paltry by comparison. It cut sharply into Elrond’s eyes, but it gleamed less brightly than the lamp. He blinked against the light that now poured into the rock, gritting his teeth, eventually lifting his free hand to his face, trying to shield his eyes. It was hardly the first time he had been confronted by sunlight that cut into his eyes like knives. The last few months of Beleriand’s existence upon this earth had often been choked with storms—not just thunderstorms, but windstorms and lightning storms and storms of all kind, storms the likes of which Elrond had not seen again. It had been far from unusual for clouds as black as coal to blanket the sky for days on end, and once they parted, even the faintest light trickling down from the sky hit the eyes like knives freshly-sharpened. This was hardly a foreign feeling.

_You would think that, being so familiar with it, I would be able to contend with it a bit better than this._

You would think that, but yet, Elrond walked ever closer towards the light, and all he could do was blink against it, gritting his teeth and knowing that the only thing that would ease the strain on his eyes would be enough exposure that whatever primitive part of his mind governed eyesight no longer thought it to be night.

So it was to be that his first real sight of Himring itself would be squinting against the sunlight and trying to hold the lancing pain out of his head. Oh, that was just perfect. Elrond didn’t know why he’d expected anything else.

But he was going to see it. The path wasn’t blocked, there were no shaft collapses or boulders blocking the way out, and there wasn’t a tree growing over it. Elrond had come this far, and he would _not_ have to just turn back around and sit in a cave for three days waiting for the ship to come back for them. A giddy laugh bubbled up in Elrond’s throat, threatening to break out of his mouth as something close to a scream. This was the biggest chance at advancement he was likely to receive for a long time, and there was nothing standing in the way any longer.

“Here we are,” Celebrimbor remarked as the ground leveled out, and Elrond was so relieved to feel a gust of bracing, salty wind batter his face that he did not even mark in more than a cursory fashion the relief that saturated Celebrimbor’s own voice. “Ah, it doesn’t look as bad as I feared it would.”

That last bit, Elrond would choose to ignore. He did not want to imagine Himring in its splendor at this particular moment, did not want to imagine Himring as it could have been, had all the grief and devastation that had rocked the land never taken root in the soil and the air and the endless, endless, _endless_ waters. He could dwell on those things another time, could let them cling to his mind like mussels clung to beams that held up the piers of Mithlond when he was not about to drink in his very _first_ sight of it all. The dreams and whispers of what could have been were nothing but poison. (A poison he had drunk of many times, a poison that did not kill unless you drank quickly and deep, but a poison, it remained. Elrond might not have sense enough to avoid it, but he knew its name and nature.)

This was to be the very first time he laid eyes on Himring. He did not wish for anything to shadow his mind.

They were standing in the midst of a highly-unkempt stretch of green—perhaps it had once been a lawn, or a courtyard of some sort, though as Elrond got a better sense of his bearings, blinking sunlight out of his eyes, he saw that the space was much larger than that.

He was facing, at a great remove, a tall wall of crumbling, mossy gray stone and a forbidding iron gate that even at this distance was visibly pocked with flaking spots of rust. In between himself and that wall and gate was long, wiry grass bent this way and that, having clearly suffered long stretches of abuse by the howling wind—indeed, the wind was buffeting it back and forth even now. The grass did not stand uninterrupted, however. Growing up out of what had once no doubt been a well-kept and orderly green—Elrond tried to push down the thoughts, the creeping poison of thoughts of what might have been had the Rodyn acted more quickly and been less destructive in their ‘help,’ of what could have been had _all_ the Men who had sworn themselves to the Ñoldor in the First Age kept faith, and though they would not quit his mind entirely, he could only hope that their shadows would not be great or noxious enough to poison his impressions entirely—were short, stumpy trees and long stretches of scraggly bushes cut through like low hedge-walls, if those hedge-walls had been planted by someone who had no concept either of the actual function of walls, or of the concept of the fact that people needed to be able to navigate their way around them easily.

Elrond squinted at those bushes, a frown playing on his lips as he tried to make out exactly what sort of bush he was looking at.

_…Blackberries. They’re more blackberry bushes._

Elrond stifled a harsh chortle—he had a feeling the noise would have only had Celebrimbor wondering if he was choking on thin air. Well, at least they would not want for _something_ in the way of fresh food while they were here.

Perhaps, if Elrond came to this place in another hundred years or so and no one had disturbed the former green in the meantime, there would be a full-blown forest growing there, instead of just the short trees he saw scattered about now. Even if that was so, Elrond did not think he would spend too much time exploring that forest. He could only imagine how Maedhros would have responded to the state of disrepair the green had fallen into. He did not want to spend his days here filled with the phantom strains of Maedhros’s complaints, especially not when he could imagine them so easily.

This was not the whole of Himring—far from it—and once Elrond had drank in the sight of it, he turned on his heel almost without thinking. While doing so, he briefly caught sight of Celebrimbor looking at him, a strange, foreign expression cutting into his face. Only in his eyes did Elrond see something he actually thought he could recognize, and that only because of the company he had kept for so much of his life. Someone who had lived a life in a more tranquil place and never known war-torn, bleeding, dying lands might not have been able to make heads or tails of the bright, cracked-open look that he saw flashing in Celebrimbor’s eyes as he turned on his heel. Elrond could.

He knew that look. He had never experienced it focused directly upon himself before.

The hand-holding had not felt like this at all. Elrond did not think he had felt quite so exposed when their hands touched.

He really did not have time to worry about this. (Really did not know what exactly he was supposed to _do_ about this.)

Elrond had been unable to see the fortress atop the island from the ship they had sailed here. It was located on the far northern end of what had once been Himring Hill—Elrond knew that much from old maps, at least—and that would likely account for it. Perhaps he had focused a little too much on the island itself. That was also possible.

Whatever the reason, the fortress wasn’t out of sight any longer. The wind could batter against Elrond all he liked, could howl in his ears and blow the strands of his hair that had come loose across his face and try to obscure his vision all it liked, but it could not blind him. The Sea could renew its song, maddening in spite of how much it still did not call for him—and sure enough, now that Elrond was back on solid ground, he could hear it once more—but it was not enough to distract him.

…Elrond did not know why, but he had expected the fortress and the walls of the surrounding town to be constructed from black stone. Truly, he did not know why; it was not as if Elrond had ever asked anyone to tell him what _color_ the fortress’s walls were. Black had come to mind perhaps because it had seemed what would fit Maedhros’s mood best.

Elrond had only ever known Maedhros at his worst, at the absolute lowest points of his life. He had known Maedhros in his bitterness and his despair. He had not known the prince of the Ñoldor. He had not known the Lord of Himring. Maedhros who had built Himring was… was a stranger to Elrond, however much he felt also like an illusion, a phantasm devised by storytellers who needed a stopgap between Maedhros on the mountain and Maedhros in the fire. (Elrond had looked for traces of the noble prince of the Ñoldor, a great ruler among the Exiles, in the man whom he had known. What he had seen felt like it could have been a trace, but it felt far more like a phantasm all its own, so fleeting that it dissolved at the first glance of sunlight.) His mind could register Maedhros’s involvement in this place, could register Maedhros having _lived_ in this place for centuries on end, but his heart knew Maedhros only as the bitter, ragged vagabond who had stared at Elrond and Elros so dubiously when Maglor had first brought them to him, and had warmed to them only slowly.

Perhaps those buildings in the town that were low enough as to be totally obscured by the inner walls were made of black stone, or perhaps _some_ of them were. What Elrond saw in the afternoon light, though, that was gray. The closest any of it came to black was westering Anor casting shadows over the fortress, spreading them east, and painting the stone touched by those shadows with the hours-away promise of night. The rest of it was just solid gray stone, the same deep gray, slightly tinged with blue, of the outer walls. The walls separating the town from the green were visibly crumbling even at this distance, though Elrond could not tell if they were as carpeted in moss and lichen as were the outer walls. It was reasonable to assume that they were. And they were not what drew the lion’s share of his attention.

When Elrond had heard descriptions of the fortress that stood atop Himring Hill, he had never gotten specifics. There had been few who particularly _wanted_ to go into a great deal of detail regarding the layout of the fortress that had been the stronghold of the head of the House of Fëanor, either in speaking or in writing. He had had frustratingly vague descriptions of it as ‘solid,’ as a fortress fit to break armies against its walls, and he had been forced to make do with that.

He was not standing close by the fortress now. Looking upon it from afar, Elrond could well imagine the despair of any soldier in any force sent to take Himring from its lord. It was… Elrond could not imagine how it was that he hadn’t seen the fortress from the ship, even if they were approaching the island from the south—the fortress was _immense_. As the island had cut into the sky as a jagged tooth, so too did the fortress cut into the sky, carving out the now-cloudy blue and leaving a gray wound of outlandish shape behind in its place.

The many towers of Himring were crumbling. Time had not been kind to the fortress in that respect. The tumult of the earth had no doubt been actively cruel, and the Sea and the wind even more so. One tower seemed to have partially collapsed—where the conical roof possessed by the other towers should have been, there was only a jagged ruin that stood maybe half as tall as the two towers closest to it. But the walls of the fortress were intact. Where the outer walls encompassing the fortress, the town, and the green were crumbling, where the inner walls that encompassed the fortress and the town were slowly collapsing also, the walls of the fortress yet stood strong and tall and true. From so far away, Elrond could not have begun to guess how thick they were, but even from this distance, all that was needed was to look at them to gain the impression of weight, of power, of the ability to endure and to weather all slings and arrows.

Those were not walls that had ever yielded to any foe.

The halls within, Elrond might find altered by age and long abandonment, but intact.

He sucked in a deep breath, seeking to steady himself. Anticipation had him in its grip, strong as a vise, but there was something else mingled with it, something that made it more difficult than it should have been to shake off stillness and begin the long walk towards all that beckoned to him.

(He was still waiting for Celebrimbor to—)

“Shall we go?” and if Elrond’s voice was not totally confident, the lightness he had managed to inject into it was steady, at least.

Celebrimbor stared at him a long moment, lips pursed, eyes searching. Then, he nodded, unsmiling. His eyes flickered to the fortress for a moment before he looked away, flinching as if burned. “Let us go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Anor** —the Sindarin name for the Sun  
>  **Eldar** —‘People of the Stars’ (Quenya); a name first given to the Elves by Oromë when he found them by Cuiviénen, but later came to refer only to those who answered the summons to Aman and set out on the March, with those who chose to remain by Cuiviénen coming to be known as the Avari; the Eldar were composed of these groups: the Vanyar, Ñoldor (those among them who chose to go to Aman), and the Teleri (including their divisions: the Lindar, Falmari, Sindar and Nandor).  
>  **Rodyn** —Valar (singular: Rodon) (Sindarin): a common Sindarin name for the Valar


	10. Chapter Ten

“The library wasn’t in one of the towers, was it? They don’t seem to have fared as well as the main body of the fortress.”

“No, Elrond, it wasn’t. The towers were for more practical purposes than that.”

“A library isn’t _impractical_ ,” Elrond said peevishly, picking his way around one of the boulders that were becoming more prevalent the closer they got to the inner walls.

Celebrimbor shook his head, visibly restraining a laugh. “I misspoke, perhaps. The towers were meant for various aspects of the fortress’s defense if it was ever attacked or put under siege. The one which has collapsed was a bell tower. I’m surprised the raven tower is still here, though; in order to let the ravens come and go as they pleased, the construction on the tower was necessarily rather frail.” Catching sight of Elrond’s bemused expression, he explained, “The ravens carried messages back and forth, for things that didn’t need to be relegated to the palantíri. They were rarely in any danger from Morgoth. I’m not certain why that was, actually—perhaps the ravens were able to evade his own scouts, or else he merely overlooked them.”

Given that Morgoth had managed to overlook Lúthien and Beren infiltrating his lands, _especially_ given who Lúthien had been, Elrond thought the latter might have been closer to the truth. Also, Gondolin had been nearly on Angband’s doorstep, so… The Enemy did seem to have had a knack for overlooking that which should have been a much, _much_ greater concern right from the beginning. It wasn’t a complaint. Elrond wouldn’t _be_ here without that penchant for overlooking the important. It was just an observation.

In retrospect, it was something of a miracle that the refugee camp in the Lisgardh hadn’t been ravaged long before it had. There had been nothing protecting them, nothing at _all_ , except the scant privacy provided by a dense forest of tall reeds. Elrond could remember cook fires and fires ignited just to give some meager warmth to the biting chill of winter nights. The smoke from those fires must have been visible for miles around. If the Enemy had ever devoted half a thought to the matter, the refugee camp in the Lisgardh could have been destroyed in even shorter time than what it took the Fëanorians to bloody the sands and the tide pools. One would think he would have _wanted_ to do that, would have wanted to destroy the granddaughter, the last surviving descendant, of those two who had humiliated him so comprehensively.

Sometimes, the fact that Elrond was even alive to look back on these events with confusion baffled him. His own existence felt statistically improbable.

It wasn’t as slow going here as it had been in the bowels of the hill, that much was for certain. Though he may simply have overlooked them—though Elrond _hoped_ he wasn’t as prone as their vanquished and banished (hopefully for _good_ , this time) Enemy to overlooking things that could prove his downfall—Elrond had seen no sign of any of the holes in the ground he had had the distinct displeasure to catch sight of as they had made their ascent to the peak. Whatever else had happened to the fortress in the intervening decades between its abandonment and this, his first visit, the ground yet remained steady. Considering all of the earthquakes that had rocked the land, Elrond supposed he should be grateful for that.

_One hopes I will not find every last fragile object in the fortress itself shattered. The structure might be sturdy enough to withstand all knocks, but there are any manner of things within the fortress that likely wouldn’t be capable of such._

Elrond imagined shattered glass and warped and twisted metal. He imagined rotting cloth and paper, the remembered stench of rotting food that would linger in the kitchens and the food cellars long after every last trace of them had vanished from the world, scavenged by rats or sunk back down into the earth from which they were ultimately derived.

He and Elros had stayed in a house left abandoned by Laegrim once, as children. Maedhros and Maglor had been… He did not know precisely where they had been. They had left them in that house, and bid them not to come out until they returned—there had been enough food left with them to last for a couple of days, but that had been stretched thin by the time those two mismatched shadows had finally reappeared in the doorway.

The house had been abandoned some years prior, or so Elrond had always supposed. The exact depth of the layers of dust gathering on the furniture and other hard, flat surfaces in the house certainly suggested that the house had not been occupied in quite some time. There had been…

To this day, Elrond was uncertain of the exact reasons the owners of the house had left it behind, or under exactly what circumstances. The only sign that even remotely pointed towards the occupants having left in a hurry was the fact that neither of the two beds in the house had been properly made, their faded and musty-smelling blankets crumpled around the foot of each of the beds. The only sign that they had left at all was that when Elrond and Elros went looking around, went poking through the cupboards and cabinets and the chests they found in their exploration of the house, they found all of them to be empty. Everything that had once existed within this space to give some hint to the character of their owners was gone. The house was a question without an answer, a sentence that trailed off into nothingness without ever finding an end.

Elrond stared out at the fortress, looming ever larger on the horizon with each step he took towards it. What would he find within the walls? Would he find a story cut off mid-sentence? Would he find a question without an answer, a sentence that could never end? Would he find…

“Celebrimbor?” Elrond struggled to keep unease tensing his voice to a taut pitch. For a few moments, he struggled valiantly. Inevitably, though, he lost the battle with unease, and it seeped into his voice as diluted, bitter poison. “Are we likely to find any… remains?”

Celebrimbor did not answer him immediately. A deep frown creased his mouth, turning the corners of his lips downwards towards his jaw. “I… I am not certain, one way or another. The fortress was evacuated during the Nirnaeth before any of our foes could reach this place. There may have been some soldiers left behind, perhaps in the hope that Maedhros would be able to return here, soon.”

A vain hope, as they both knew all too well. The Sons of Fëanor had become houseless vagabonds after the Nirnaeth, their forces so scattered and depleted that for a long time following the disastrous battle, they had been more inclined to flee foes than to face them. Amon Ereb had served as some sort of base, but Elrond had never gotten the impression that it was supposed to serve as a permanent _home_ , not to any of the brothers themselves.

The air was choked with the bitter echoes of vain hopes, here. The howling wind was so thick with them that every time a gust hit him, Elrond half-expected to feel the keen, serrated edge of a hope gone unfulfilled cut into his skin with all the mercy and tenderness of a flail.

“All our hopes came to nothing,” Celebrimbor muttered, staring straight ahead, “and this, alone, remains.”

 _And you_. The House of Fëanor still had one scion yet standing, one scion who would yet show his face to the world of Edhil and Men. But a man who did not wear his house’s crest, and only rarely alluded to his own family history outside select company? A man who did not wage war or conquest or do deeds that would have heaped glory on his name? A man who had never, not to Elrond’s eyes, seemed to desire such things?

Elrond looked once more upon what remained of what had been, in its heyday, the greatest fortress of the Eldar in Ennor. It was no less imposing now that he was perhaps a hundred feet away from the inner gate, but now that he possessed such greater proximity, more signs of disrepair were visible to the appraising eye than just a collapsed bell tower.

The ramparts were visibly crumbling in places, leaving great gaps in what should have been reasonably sheltered walkways, like teeth missing out of a broken jaw. Shingles had fallen out of the roofs of many of the surviving towers, exposing the rotting beams and rafters that had held them up in the first place—Elrond had a feeling it would not be much longer before the bell tower had a companion on the ground.

Most jarring of all, however, was the vast array of lightless windows.

Himring had more windows than Elrond would have thought. Somehow, he had imagined it bearing closer similarity in appearance to Amon Ereb, that bleak little drowned fortress, than the castle in the capital in Lindon. And oh, make no mistake, it was clear from first glance that this was a place with _defense_ in the forefront of its mind, above all other considerations. But a large collection of spacious windows would not have been the most practical measure for someone who valued defense and surety above all other things, and yet…

The glass was long since gone. There was any number of things that could have spelled its demise, and Elrond did not have the time on this windy afternoon to list them all. Irresistibly, though, did bob up to the surface the thought, the _wonder_ , at what the glass must have been like, what shapes and colors must once have chased each other through the window frames carved deep into unyielding gray stone, the brightest flashes of color to be spotted for miles around.

(Perhaps he could ask Celebrimbor. Perhaps. And perhaps Celebrimbor would not ask in return how it was that Elrond did not know.)

It must have been all of the other fortifications and measures taken to protect those who had once lived here. If an invading force was able to get up the hill in any great numbers, Elrond thought that the defenders might have trusted to the outer walls, or the inner walls. If all walls were breached, then the defenders would have bigger problems than the windows being impractically large and numerous. There were likely ways into the bowels of the hill that opened up into the fortress itself, if only to facilitate an evacuation in the event of, well, what would happen if large and numerous windows were the least of the defenders’ worries. In such a case as this, why _not_ have the windows, if you could find stonemasons to carve the openings and glaziers to fashion the glass that would sit within the frames.

But now, no matter how splendid the glass in the windows might have been in Himring’s heyday, it did not matter. The glass was shattered and scattered to the winds, much of it probably dwelling on the sea floor to serve as the playthings of Ulmo’s Maiar. Himring no longer had windows, not really. It had a thousand empty, staring eyes, and the darkness suited them, the darkness was _right_ for them, and yet, Elrond kept watching them, waiting for the lighting of a candle.

The fortress was truly dead. Its lightless windows were the surest sign of its ruin that Elrond could think of. There were always some windows light in a castle, no matter the time of day or night, for kitchen servants got up well before dawn and there were always guards on duty no matter what black hour of the night it might be, and they still needed light to guide their paths. If there was any life within a castle, any at all, there would be light to show for it. Even the Orcs lit lamps in their warped and tumorous strongholds, though the light put off by those lamps might be dank and greasy and fit to make you feel like you needed a bath if the lamplight so much as glanced your way.

Elrond stared up at the fortress. A thousand empty eye sockets stared back at him, littering the upturned skull beneath a broken upper jaw with all of its teeth knocked out, and fragments of bone clinging defiantly to the mandible, though as the broken bell tower attested, time would make mockery of their defiance, if the island persisted for long enough without finally falling into the Sea.

Where such an image had come from, Elrond could not say. (Could not, _could_ not. The idea was creeping along in his mind, spiteful and stubborn, and to give it a voice would have made it into a monster with strength enough to break out of his mind and speak and rave regardless of Elrond’s will. It would stay voiceless and unnamed. That was the only reliable way to deprive such things of their power. At least, that had been Elrond’s experience.) But it clung to him, hung on his teeth, waiting so impatiently for him to slip and let it loose. It was here, now, and there was no use trying to ignore its presence when it clung so stubbornly.

Perhaps there would yet be some matter clinging to the interior of the skull that Elrond could find some value in (Or take some comfort in, but that seemed a more remote possibility—the only comfort it would provide was the fierce half-comfort of looking at something and knowing it was the gateway to a brighter future, if only he could leverage it correctly. But that was not a gentle thought, and comfort should be gentle). Come what may, Elrond was going to find out.

At last, they came to the gate, and here, Elrond flagged a little, for they found it locked. The doors and lock were both made of metal; the eight-pointed Star of Fëanor sat slightly off-center, so that five points were cut into the left-hand door, and three points into the right. Though rusted, the doors and lock looked more than sturdy, verging into outright formidable; Elrond had little hope that it would give way under any blows the two of them could unleash, even when working in concert. This was not a gate that caved under any blows any child of the Eldar was capable of. This was a gate that shrugged them off like Elrond shrugged off a fly landing on his shoulder.

Could they climb? Elrond looked past the gate to the stone walls on either side of it. Perhaps in Himring’s heyday, they had been smooth, but now they were rough and coarse, pitted with indentations that, perhaps, if Elrond was very quick and very careful, could have served as handholds. The wall was perhaps three times his height. It would have been hazardous to climb it, and there was a very real chance that he would have to jump down from the top of the wall, which was unlikely to end well unless Elrond was very lucky in his timing. Maybe there was a building close enough to the wall that he could jump onto the roof. If the roof wasn’t too badly rotted…

“I wonder,” Celebrimbor said conversationally, regarding Elrond’s contemplation of the wall with marked bemusement, “if you have perhaps forgotten why I was asked to accompany you here.”

As it happened, Elrond had _not_ , but he rarely expected things to go easily for him. He set his jaw and nodded curtly at the gate, pinning Celebrimbor (or trying to, anyways; he wasn’t certain the end result actually _managed_ ‘pinning’) in a challenging stare. “Very well, then. _Do something_.”

Momentarily taken aback, Celebrimbor’s eyebrows shot up towards his hairline. He took not one step closer to the gate, just looked at Elrond with his brow knit and his head tilted slightly to one side. Elrond began to worry, stomach churning, if he had offended him, but then, the moment passed, and Celebrimbor shrugged his shoulders and stepped forward to the gate. “As you wish,” he murmured, noncommittal.

He began to tap the points of the star, one by one, though he did not move clockwise or counter-clockwise, instead, tapping points of the star at random, with no clear rhyme or reason. Once he had tapped the last of the eight points remaining, Celebrimbor paused a moment, sucking in a deep breath, nostrils flaring. When he pressed his hand flat in the middle of the star, Elrond watched it tremble, fingers splayed out wide and trying to inch back towards each other.

Celebrimbor muttered something, spoken in too low and quiet a tone for Elrond to make it out clearly, though he heard enough to recognize Quenya passing through Celebrimbor’s lips, rather than Sindarin. Elrond had been taught Quenya as a child, even before being spirited away from the Lisgardh—Elwing might have been Elu Thingol’s great-grandchild, the inheritor of his crooked legacy, with all that that entailed for the language of the Exiles, but she had never been so harsh on the language as her forefather could claim. Elrond had no idea why—he had, after all, been all of five years old the last time he laid eyes on his mother, and when he was five years old, he had never thought to ask her such a question. Perhaps it was because Elwing had married an Exile, a man who had spent the earliest years of his childhood in a kingdom where an amalgamation of Quenya and Mithrim Sindarin was spoken openly, without a care in the world for what Thingol thought of them for doing so. Perhaps it was the pragmatism of one who knew that the greater part of those living in the refugee camp that she was technically in charge of were Exiles, and that alienating them would be crippling to the camp’s defense. Perhaps it was simply that Elwing had never felt the animosity towards the Exiles possessed by her forefather.

(Elrond counted the last possibility the least-likely. Someone in his mother’s position… He could never know for sure. Elwing had kept her own counsel, kept no confidant but her husband. He could never know unless he _asked_ her, and that seemed about as likely as Beleriand rising up out of the Sea. But Elrond could not help but think that someone in his mother’s position would not have looked the other way when those around her violated the Ban on Quenya simply because she felt no _animosity_. If anyone had a right to nurse animosity in her heart the way someone else would coddle their greatest treasures, it was Elwing.)

Whatever the reason, Quenya had been, if not constantly spoken, at least regularly-enough spoken in the Lisgardh for Elrond to have been almost as familiar with it as a very small child as he had been with Sindarin. But even then, he had known that it was, if by the word of a dead man, verboten, taboo, and whenever he had heard it spoken, he had stiffened a little, even if he’d never understood the full import behind the feeling of unease that crept over him.

In the Second Age of Anor, the matter of the Ban had come up in council, once. Elrond had been very new to the court, and this had been the first time he had been asked to sit in during a council meeting. He’d not understood _why_ , until the Ban came up in conversation. He’d been only half-listening to Gil-galad talk, admittedly rather irritated by the fact that he’d been dragged away from his reading to be there—he would come to understand later the honor of the responsibility, but in those days he’d needed the distraction of arduous reading like he needed air to breathe and water to drink—and then, suddenly, everyone had just been looking at him.

Looking at him, clearly expecting _him_ to make some sort of pronouncement.

It had been a long, taut, breathless moment before Elrond had finally understood why.

Elrond _could_ say that he had made some sort of speech on the fruitlessness and cruelty of divesting an entire people of their language, regardless of how they might have offended the person who had tried to do the divesting. He could say that he had been eloquent, and his words had been heartfelt. But that would be a lie. Elrond _had_ feelings about the Ban. He had little doubt about that; he’d never met a single Edhel who had lived in Beleriand while it was in place who was _indifferent_ to it. Everyone had an opinion about the Ban. Everyone had _feelings_ about the Ban. But in Elrond’s case, those feelings were sunk too deep into his bones for him to decipher them in any way that could have made sense—either to his audience, or to him.

As it was, Elrond had stared back at all of them like a deer caught out by a hunter, before finally shrugging his shoulders and lamely muttering that he’d always thought it a pointless endeavor.

And no one had seemed _angry_ with him, not even the die-hard Iathrim in the council chambers who subtly or not-so-subtly sneered at everything Ñoldorin despite living in the court of the _High King of the Ñoldor_. No one had seemed angry with the idea of the Ban being rendered null and void. As far as everyone was concerned, the Ban was a skeleton they couldn’t shove back into that closet quickly enough. They had all seemed relieved just to be done with it.

Quenya was spoken freely in Gil-galad’s court, the speakers unafraid of the ostracism of the Sindar at large for doing so, even if there were some scattered Sindar here and there who yet felt that, actually, the Ban _had_ been a good idea and they _were_ going to continue following it. (Who these Sindar were, Elrond did not know. He had never met them, hoped he never would, and did _not_ care to think of ever having to seek them out. His mind already catapulted him back into the First Age on a depressingly regular basis. The last thing he either needed or wanted was the company of those who would have sooner cheered the regression on, rather than trying to aid him in moving away from it.) Quenya was more the language of scholars in Lindon than it was the language of the Exiles, per se, but Ñoldorin parents no longer had to fear being shunned by their neighbors if it got out that they’d been teaching their children Quenya while all the doors were barred and all the shutters were latched. They no longer had to hide it at all.

And yet, when Elrond heard the language spoken, he still had to push down the strain of unease, the little voice whispering in his mind of the forbidden and the unworthy and the blood-drenched. When Quenya fell from his own lips, Elrond felt a little as if he was speaking in blood, inscribing his words in crimson upon the empty air. It was his own blood, and he could spend it how he liked. That did not make it all feel any less taboo.

The unease clawing up and down Elrond’s throat only intensified as something in the gate clicked once Celebrimbor had finished muttering, and the gate, albeit with the furious protests of rust and age and neglect, screams fit to rend the sky and expose the Void lurking behind, gave way very slightly under Celebrimbor’s still-shaking hand. The Ban and all of his feelings regarding it were etched too deeply into his bones to efface them without destroying everything else of him alongside. It seemed that there had been some for whom the Ban had been etched into them in entirely different words.

Why it was the Quenya, more than anything else, that made this place feel like stepping into the vanished past, Elrond could not say. Quenya was alive, and all else of Himring was dead. But Celebrimbor had said the chant… incantation… whatever it was, Elrond shook off the indecision as irritably as he would have shaken off an itchy woolen cloak in the height of summertime, and all of a sudden, the air had changed. No longer were the miserable ghosts of vain hopes what assailed Elrond. Now, what was carried to him on the wind carried the scent of rancid copper, the sickly-sweet stench of old blood. When it carried air that could transmit scent at all, anyways. The past was devoid of air. The air here was very thin, and Elrond had to struggle for a breath.

That felt more fitting for the dead master of this dead place than any expression of splendor ever could.

Celebrimbor turned back to him, unsmiling. “In times past, there would always have been a gatekeeper on duty, ready to open the gates from within. But even then, it was understood that we might come upon a time when there was no gatekeeper, and we would yet still need to enter in a hurry. This…” He frowned. “It’s the first time I ever had need of that password.”

Elrond frowned in return. “Why tell me that? You hardly need to justify your knowledge of your own uncle’s fortress.”

Celebrimbor shrugged. “Because no one else had known.”

And it was something he could well have gone on being the only person who knew about it. Elrond failed to see how the secret was of any great import. Most of the great fortresses had such passwords, such secrets, things that were known only to the master and their close kin. There was a certain degree of paranoia present in every great mind among the Edhil—or, at least, that had been Elrond’s experience. If anyone was to tell Oropher or Duileth that they shared any traits in common with Maedhros, Elrond would honestly not want to be anywhere in the vicinity of _that_ revelation; the echoes from the screaming would likely rival the Lammoth.

But there was something clinging to the underbelly of Celebrimbor’s voice, something strange and vulnerable and cut-open, shying away from his scrutiny, determined not to be discerned, but not quite determined enough. Elrond could not name it, and it was enough, by itself, when it shrank away from the light of his eyes once more, to dispel any irritation he might have felt. Who could be irritated with something like that?

“I suppose there are many other things that only you have known.” Elrond did wish, though, that he could have made his voice sound less stilted as he stared through the crack in the double-doors of the gate, hungry for whatever glimpse he could get of the town beyond. “I wonder what sort of difference it will make for it to be two who knows them, rather than one.”

Celebrimbor shrugged once more, though the way his throat bobbed when he swallowed effectively erased any nonchalance from the gesture. “It will become less burdensome to me, to no longer carry the knowledge alone.” His voice sounded stilted, too. No, not stilted. Brittle. “Does that make a difference to you?”

There, they differed. When had Elrond ever felt less burdened by someone else knowing the intimate details of his life? There had been Elros, yes, but Elros was on a different path now, a path that would eventually diverge so far from Elrond’s that not only would they never _cross_ again, they would be so far apart as to be invisible for each other—after a certain point, they would pass out of sight, and Elrond would never have a glimpse of his brother again. He loved his brother, would have done almost anything for him—but he could no longer rely on Elros for comfort. Elros could no longer be a consideration, in that regard.

There were many, entirely _too_ many, who had regarded the tale of Elrond’s life as being something for public consumption. Where other people’s shadows could have been consigned to the back of their minds and left there, undisturbed, Elrond had constantly had to contend with people determined to drag those shadows out into the light, determined to pick them apart, dissect them, suck the marrow from their bones. Why _he_ was subject to this treatment, and the likes of Galadriel and Gil-galad were left alone, Elrond wished he knew. The Edhil loved a good story, but why _his_ was the one they kept coming back to over and over again, why _his_ was the one they would not leave alone, he did not wish to contemplate. He did not want to hear songs sung about his parents, or his grandparents, or his great-grandparents (though this was probably a lost cause; the Edhil loved a good love story even more than they loved a good ordinary story), or his great- _great_ -grandparents. He did not want to listen to poems read aloud on any of those subjects. He only wished to hear the virtues of Elenna extolled because Elros was spiraling so far away from him, and it was nice to think that Elros’s descendants, his short-lived, ephemeral descendants, would at least be able to live their short lives in safe, fair lands. Elrond did _not_ want to contend with the prying and the impertinent trying to dig more details of his childhood out of him like someone would sift through sand, looking for fragments of pretty shells.

Celebrimbor had been one of those. True, he had ever backed away when Elrond demurred or snapped or snarled, but he had been persistent in his attempts. He always came back around eventually, and if his inquiries were indirect, Elrond knew full well what sat waiting behind them. Celebrimbor wasn’t _that_ good at hiding his intentions, and Elrond was not that good at pretending he did not understand the intentions of others.

If it was out of some sort of ill-conceived attempt to _commiserate_ with him, then perhaps… Elrond wasn’t certain he could fully forgive it. Not yet. He did not think it would have made him feel any better, if he had followed Celebrimbor’s suggestions and intimations to their logical conclusion. Perhaps. Maybe.

He had never tried it. He had nursed the knowledge within himself for as long as it had been his, holding it within his heart even as it putrefied and turned to poison and hurt, hurt, _hurt_. It had hurt, it had always hurt, but surely the act of cutting it out of him, cutting out a piece and handing it to another person would have been agony to make that pain pale beside it. The pain was _his_. No one could share it, no one could claim it for their own. Elrond did not wish to live in an echo chamber of his own memories. They would stay within him, where no one else could sink their fingers in them and dilute them, where no one could make them into something for _consumption._

_What would it be like to share them…_

Elrond shook the stray thought from his mind, or tried to. He could still feel it hanging on, by the tips of its fingernails.

If Celebrimbor had been prying out of some ill-conceived attempt to commiserate with him, Elrond was not certain he forgave it. Not completely, not yet. But he thought he came closer to forgiving it than he did to forgiving those who were prying into the deepest and the dearest of all that caused him pain just to get their hands on a _good story_.

Did he want to forgive it?

The idea of it shifted uncomfortably under Elrond’s skin, trying to find its way to his mouth. He shoved it down, and looked again to the glimpse of the town he could catch through the crack in the doors. A question for another time. He had more than enough questions for _this_ time.

So eaten up with rust, the hinges of the gates did not give easily; they were nearly as reluctant as Elrond to give up their secrets. But after several minutes of struggle, Elrond and Celebrimbor were able to push the left-hand door open wide enough for them to walk through. There were no secrets guarded carefully enough to remain secret forever. There were no secrets in the world that would stay hidden if sought by truly determined explorers.

Elrond stared around at the deserted, decaying town. The basic stone structures of nearly every building that had once been full of life yet stood, and if they did not stand entirely _intact_ , they stood intact enough to be recognizable. Elrond saw now that hoping for an intact _rooftop_ on the other side of the wall would have not availed him, for when it came to the houses closest to the wall, there were no roofs left. They had collapsed, or rotted, or blown away during a particularly violent storm. Many of the front doors and window shutters had met the same fate, the rusty red hinges the only evidence left behind that those doors and shutters had ever existed at all.

Elrond had thought that Himring would bear more resemblance to Amon Ereb, bleak little drowned fortress, than to the capital in Lindon. Here, he had found the resemblance. Here, he caught himself listening for the voices of two bored, lonely children to make themselves heard over the howling of the wind.

No, there were no secrets that could hide from the light of day forever.

None whatsoever.

But if Elrond found something in Himring worth carrying tales of back to Lindon, there would be something about him that people could talk about rather than the kidnapped child whose life was considered the property of anyone who could find the way to Elrond’s side to ask their prying, greedy questions.

The course from the inner gate to the fortress itself did not run smooth—Celebrimbor led him on many detours down side-streets and alleys, past long-abandoned houses whose empty windows Elrond could not resist staring into, half-expecting, half-dreading, to see someone staring back out at him. But that was ridiculous, a fancy concealed by a mind that was by now beginning to process the gravity of being all alone here, but for one, solitary companion. Those houses and shops had been abandoned since the Nirnaeth. A hammer sat still on an anvil in a forge; the musty, rotting remains of hats sat on musty, rotting mannequin heads in a milliner’s shop; a set of tiny apothecary’s bottles sat on a covered stoop.

The bones of a cat were pressed up against the remains of one of the few doors left standing in this whole place, skull turned towards the wood. How it was that the bones had even survived this long, how it was that the cat’s corpse had not been scavenged and its bones scattered before slowly disintegrating, left out in the open, Elrond could not say. It seemed unlikely that it would have gone unnoticed.

Elrond thought about the cat. He thought about how long it would have taken for the cat to starve, or die of old age, or whatever had happened to it, quite possibly the only land-bound animal on the hill. Eventually, he managed to _stop_ thinking about it.

Had Menegroth looked this way after that second, cataclysmic Sack? Had there been hundreds upon hundreds of houses and shops with all of their props left behind, every last toy and trinket and treasure, when the need to flee rose up and blotted out utterly all other considerations? Had Menegroth, abandoned but yet undrowned, appeared as strong a testament to lives interrupted?

Had Menegroth seemed as much an empty tomb, waiting, _hungry_ , to be filled?

Elrond did not stop to explore any of the houses left abandoned, nor any of the shops. He did not ask to pause. Given the way Celebrimbor was acting, Elrond did not think he would have refused him, but the urge never gathered enough in strength to push out past Elrond’s mouth.

When he was tasked with the exploration of Himring, with discovering if there was anything of value left behind, anything of _note_ , Elrond knew full well that it had been the _castle_ that Gil-galad had meant, not the town surrounding it. Only the treasures of the great were sought-after, here; all else was to be consigned to the middens of history, where perhaps, one day, an archaeologist whose curiosity was a match for Elrond’s own would take an interest, but not until all that was left were scraps and fragments too small to ever be made whole once more. Reviled by so many he might have been, but Maedhros had been mighty among the Ñoldor, once. What was left of the Ñoldor was a fragment of a kingdom that now fought to make itself even one-tenth as strong or as glorious as the vanished past. They could not be picky about where they went, seeking out either knowledge or beauty.

But that was not all there was to this, and though he would have liked to deny it, would have liked to feel _normal_ , for _once_ , denial was not something Elrond could find when he searched for it. Not in this.

It did not feel like any sort of violation to delve deep into the castle. That was what old, abandoned castles were _for_ , were they not? It was the great and the good who resided in them, and if they left their castles abandoned, most likely they were not in any position to protest about anything that was done with whatever was left behind within. Besides, the precious objects of the great and the good were more than simply their possessions. They were history, they were heritage, and in such a case as this, if there was anything left of the treasure of Himring, it would be nearly all that was left of the extinguished glory of the Exiles, once so bright and shining that it dimmed Ithil and Anor themselves, now came to little more than a dim glimmer to be made out beneath the waves on moonless summer nights.

(Besides, Celebrimbor was here. If anyone could be argued to have a say in what became of the treasure of Himring, it was him, and he had breathed not one word against the purpose of this mission in all the time that he had been a part of it.)

A house left empty was something entirely different. They who had lived in the house could never have been reasonably expected to be _happy_ about their long-abandoned belongings being gawked at as wonders and curiosities. To be a simple person, to be unencumbered by rank or titles or all that came along with them, was to be endowed with the reasonable expectation of _privacy_. They had never gone through their lives with all eyes on them; they had never gone through their lives knowing that all those around them took their cues from them. Their private lives were truly private, and for decency’s sake, if nothing else, the mementoes of their private lives should be left alone, anonymous to all those but those who had owned them and known them.

…Of course, that was not Elrond’s _only_ consideration. If he was being honest, it was not even his primary consideration. It was _a_ consideration, but it was not the one at the forefront of his mind.

No, his mind was being ridiculous again, giving in to fancies and phantasms and the worry-mongering of superstitious sailors. Elrond _knew_ he was being ridiculous, but he could not stop the thoughts that crept through his mind whenever the possibility of going into one of those dark and empty houses and having a look around started to seem even slightly more attractive than it had before.

He could not shake off the feeling that, if he ever went into one of those houses, if he ever opened a cupboard or peered into a chest (if there was even a chest left standing, among those that had been abandoned by their owners; these tended to be made of wood, and wood had not fared so well here, over the years), Elrond would not be alone for long. As ridiculous as it was, Elrond could not help but think that if he started snooping around where no one had ever expected any snooping to be taking place, the owner of whatever house he chose to step into would materialize out of the ether and yell at him to get out of their house. Whether they were living or dead did not matter; in this scenario, Elrond would not have been surprised to see dry bones hovering in the air, a voice completely unconnected to the grinning skull screaming at him to let alone that which should have been left buried, that which it would be the uttermost violation to disturb.

Yes, a violation. Going into those houses and shops for anything other than basic shelter was a violation, in ways that going into the empty castle was not. And it was not a violation that Elrond was unfamiliar with. He had spent more than a few days in his childhood squatting in abandoned houses in Ossiriand. And in the royal court in Lindon… Well, he’d already expounded on that. Engaging in such a violation felt like picking open his own, barely-scabbed-over wounds.

The castle beckoned. They walked on towards it.

When finally they reached the end of the houses, Elrond had to stop and raise his eyebrows. There, once the buildings gave out, was _another_ wall and gate, separating the fortress itself from the town that encircled it.

“I wondered if this one would have been left locked,” Celebrimbor remarked, as he stepped forward to say whatever password was necessary to see them through without having to try their hands at climbing. “I imagine they evacuated in a hurry; I thought that perhaps the last person out wouldn’t have thought to lock it behind them.”

Elrond, whose experience of presently-occupied castles lived in by the Edhil was limited to the one he resided in in the capital in Lindon, and whose experience of all other castles was relegated to books that did not tell him every last specific detail of those castles’ construction, was rather less concerned about whether or not the last person fleeing Himring during the Nirnaeth had thought to lock the gates behind them, then he was by the fact that this third layer of wall and gate existed at all. “A… A third layer of gates? Really?”

“Gondolin had _seven_ , by the end.”

But Gondolin had been in many respects an exercise in splendor to the point of excess, and everyone knew it. Even the people who had lived there admitted it, and many of those whom Elrond had met were those who had helped build it _up_ to that point of excessive splendor in the first place. Gondolin was an outlier, and should not be counted.

(Nargothrond and Menegroth had both sounded much the same as Gondolin, in that respect, actually. There was a strong element of “Look what _I_ can do” in their construction that, even if it went unsaid, was plainly present. There was no use denying its presence when your city was named ‘The _Thousand Caves._ ’ But people didn’t talk about it with Nargothrond and _especially_ Menegroth the way they did with Gondolin. Given the way you tended to hear a lot of moralizing and pontificating on the pride of the Gondolindrim, on how they had become too enamored of the works of their hands and so many deaths could have been prevented if they had just heeded Ulmo’s warnings when they were delivered, instead of refusing to be parted from their homes and their treasures, Elrond had a suspicion he knew why that might be. Just… You know, a _suspicion_.)

“Was Maedhros _very_ paranoid?” Elrond pressed, as Celebrimbor began to whisper to the gate. He folded his arms across his chest. “Even when he was the lord of the most well-protected fortress in Beleriand?”

Once Celebrimbor was done whispering and the gate had given way (a little more easily than the last gate he had done this with, at least), he raised an eyebrow quizzically. “Menegroth.”

“Menegroth wasn’t a _fortress_ , though.”

“With Melian around, it might as well have been.” Celebrimbor turned away—just before he turned his head to where Elrond could no longer make out his expression, Elrond spotted his mouth twisting into something like a grimace, though frankly, it was rather too exaggerated to be a _normal_ grimace—and muttered, “When we were fleeing Himlad, some of our number ignored the warnings of the marchwardens and tried to seek shelter under the eaves of Doriath. As we made our way around Doriath to get to Nargothrond, the marchwardens would occasionally appear out of the trees to give us their corpses—Thingol did not wish for even the _corpses_ of the Exiles to reside within his kingdom.”

This part of the tale of the Dagor Bragollach had never reached Elrond’s ears, actually. He frowned as he asked, “Had they starved?”

Celebrimbor shook his head choppily. “No.”

“Burned to death?”

“No.”

“Did the marchwardens kill them?”

“No. They were always very keen to draw a firm distinction between us, the Kinslayers, and them, who were not.”

Elrond let out a small, irritated noise. He had never heard any tales of the forests of Doriath that specified how many large predatory animals were or were not living there before the Bragollach upended everything. Even if the number was quite large, they would probably have found their attention quite firmly occupied by the rivers of _fire_ pouring out of the North. Edhil made difficult prey for animals—unless an Edhel was sleeping, starving, or severely injured, Elrond wasn’t certain a predator would _bother_ , not unless they were quite desperate themselves. (All the wolves and other large animals who had disrupted the camps Elrond had been very shallowly sleeping in as a child had been pretty scrawny-looking, as it happened.) He did not think to rate that possibility too highly, in this case.

“What, then?” he asked. “How did they die?”

But Celebrimbor only let out a high-pitched, jittery laugh, his laughter reverberating in the air, as dissonant as the strike of steel against rough stone.

“ _Celebrimbor, how did they die?”_

Celebrimbor struck sharply at the air with his hand. “Put it out of your mind. I should not have brought it up.”

“I will _not_ ; what happened to them?!”

Celebrimbor hunched over momentarily, clutching at his upper arms, before straightening to his full height and forcing his arms back down against his sides. “Ask Oropher when we return, if you are truly curious.” His eyes were glittering strangely when he met Elrond’s gaze. “I am certain he would be _more_ than happy to relate the details to you. As for me, I will speak of it no more.”

Elrond set his jaw. “Funny, I didn’t expect _you_ to refuse to speak of such things.” Temper loosening his tongue more than was wise, he went on, grinding out, “I’ve normally found you all too eager to inquire after things other people have found distasteful.”

Later, Elrond would think of how easily Celebrimbor could have misinterpreted that, just how easily he could have deemed it to mean any number of things that Elrond had not been intimating about at all. That was the hazard of making such remarks at someone whose daily life you were not familiar with in any great detail—anything could be going on outside of your sight. But Elrond had been hungry for knowledge and his mind screamed with the stinging anger specific to knowledge left dangling out of reach, just beyond where he could have leapt up and grasped at it. He had not been considering too closely how his words could be misinterpreted. He’d not been considering that at all. It was not important.

As it was, Celebrimbor stared at him a long moment, and… Do you know, the most terrible, the most embarrassing thing about it all, was that he did not even look angry? Here was Elrond, stewing first with anger and then, as just what it was he had said began to repeat itself over and over in his mind, with embarrassment and concern, and Celebrimbor’s expression had darkened not an iota.

Not that it was an especially bright expression to begin with.

“If you have objections, Elrond,” Celebrimbor said quietly, “you should make them known. Otherwise, how can others know that you have these objections in the first place?”

 _As if you would have stopped if I had objected,_ Elrond thought, his anger trying at one last, hot gasp of air before sinking entirely into the fetid soup of embarrassment. Besides—a red-hot spark glowed briefly below the surface—even if he had never said it in so many words, there were cues that could easily have been picked up on, if Celebrimbor had been paying attention to them. Edhil did not rely on speech alone to guide their interactions with others. Elrond had made himself perfectly clear.

Hadn’t he?

While he was pondering that, Celebrimbor stepped through the gate—the _last_ gate, Elrond hoped; he would deem Maedhros a hopeless paranoiac, even when he had yet been at the height of his power, regardless of anything Celebrimbor had to say—and began to make his way towards the castle. Anger and embarrassment and uncertainty for the moment put to the side (though not so far away that Elrond couldn’t yet hear them squabbling with each other), Elrond followed after.

The gate opened on another patch of green, this one similar in some respects to the one the passageway they had taken through the bowels of the island had opened upon. There were considerably fewer trees growing up through the grass, and no blackberry bushes that Elrond could see, but the grass was just as overgrown. More sheltered from the wind, it stood fully-upright, reaching up to Elrond’s waist. Skin crawling, Elrond forced himself not to think about ticks and the other biting things that lived and thrived in such untended fields—almost.

Barely visible in the green, there was a path made of brick. When it was regularly cared for, Elrond imagined the bricks must have been splendid in hue, but as with all things on the island of Tol Himling, splendor had long since run to desolation, and while there was a beauty to be found in desolation, if you were willing to search for it, he would never have thought to compare it to, say, the splendor of the capital in Lindon, or newly-wrought Armenelos and Andúnië in Elenna.

As it was, it had taken Elrond some time to realize that there was a path at all, for the grass grew up so thickly through every crack and seam it could find. The bricks were choked with weeds and leaves and patches of mottled white and gray lichen, and the rare glimpse Elrond got of what lied beneath all of that was a red so dull and murky that it looked almost brown, like the samples of potting soil they had received from Edhellond when plants from that region were added to one of the capital’s greenhouses.

The castle was even more forbidding close up. The biggest difference was that Elrond no longer had the impression of an upturned, broken skull, but of an entire skeleton, sunk partly into the earth, so vast that when it yet lived, all the earth would have trembled under the strength of even one of the creature’s footsteps.

Mayhap there was still some marrow in the bones. Elrond was about to find out.

Celebrimbor’s supposition regarding the haste of the Edhil who had fled Himring during the Nirnaeth turned out to be correct after all, just with the main doors into the castle’s entrance hall, rather than regarding the inner gates. No password needed here, no force needed to be applied to the doors to see them inside. The doors, which were still completely intact despite all of the other wooden structures Elrond had seen in the town being, at best, in _serious_ states of disrepair (perhaps there were some charms to thank for this), gave after Celebrimbor put, honestly, not even that much pressure upon them, the rusted hinges screeching but still _giving_.

The doors gave too easily, honestly—even if the fortress was still lived in, even if the castle was still manned and being maintained, Elrond would have had no choice but to take note of it. Doors that gave so easily when someone pressed their hand against them, Elrond could not imagine such doors faring too well in the event of a siege. They were considerably lighter than the impression given by their appearance—perhaps—and if someone took a battering ram to it… Well, Elrond had an image in his head of someone taking a hammer to a glass windowpane.

But charms weren’t something he should be dismissing out of hand. Elrond had not been _too_ intimately involved in the construction of Gil-galad’s current seat of power, and the Second Age of Anor _was_ supposed to be a more peaceful Age than the Age that had come before it, but the builders had not been born yesterday, after all. They had all lived through the First Age, themselves, even if some of them had lived through more of it than had others, and there were tricks that the magically-talented (or even not all that talented; Elrond was to understand that some of the best charms were _very_ basic) builder could employ to fortify their creations. A fortress castle would likely be the focus of a great many of those charms and incantations—given Maglor’s proximity, perhaps a Song of Power or two, as well. Elrond had never had the pleasure of watching anyone open the main doors into the entrance hall of the castle he currently called his home. Would they have opened as easily, under Gil-galad’s hand?

It was hardly worth contemplating now.

Afternoon sunlight poured into the entrance hall, through the now-open main doors and the many windows bereft of both glass and shutters, catching on the motes of dust glittering in the air like dingy constellations trapped within walls of stone. Elrond drank in his first sight of the interior of Himring Castle, once the greatest fortress of the First Age, and…

…And he had to stop for the longest moment, standing in the doorway, as he was stopped cold by the thorny knot of emotions that wrapped themselves around his heart, tight enough to choke.

Admittedly, the sickly-sweet stench of mold was pretty overpowering as well.

The floor was littered with dead leaves. That there were fewer trees within this last layer of gates did not matter when there had been well over a hundred years since the last time anyone had been here to clean the entrance hall of debris. The entrance hall was vast beyond Elrond’s imagining; if Elrond had had the means, he thought that he would have been to fit at least ten of the houses in the town within the hall quite comfortably, and he was _not_ considering the smaller houses in this scenario. He was _not_ considering it well-lit and clean and full of the castle’s former residents, was _not_ considering this, _could_ not consider it, couldn’t consider it without what wrapped around his heart constricting, _squeezing_ …

For one thing, Elrond could not imagine the way the castle’s former inhabitants would have turned their noses up at the state the entrance hall found itself in, now.

It wasn’t just the dead leaves littering the floor. The glass in the windows had been blown out long enough for the leaves to pile up like little hills under the windowsills where the wind could not disrupt them so severely, and that the glass had been blown out that long meant that the elements of nature had ruled here for decades on end. Their reign had been shorter than that of Maedhros, but they had made as much of a mark upon the interior of this hall as Maedhros ever had.

The vast floor of the entrance hall was covered with thick rugs, no doubt intended as insulation against the cold that ever permeated the air around Himring, even in the height of summer, in the days when Morgoth still had power over Ennor to rob even high summer of its heat. Elrond did pause for a moment to wonder just how much effort went into cleaning them. Even if this entrance hall was only for those who either had the wherewithal to clean their shoes before entering or those who weren’t likely to have been doing anything that would have resulted in them wearing muddy shoes, Elrond shuddered at the thought of just how much _time_ the servants would have spent on those rugs, all for the sake of making the fortress known as the Ever-Cold a little more hospitable to those who must dwell within its walls.

Those servants would have been shuddering _now_ , if they could have seen the state the rugs had been left in by years, maybe decades, maybe more than a _century_ of exposure to the weather, with nothing to mitigate it by the mostly vain hope that _perhaps_ the spacing of the windows would be enough to keep too much of the rain to get in, if the wind was blowing it in a very specific, fortunate direction.

Elrond did not think it wise for he and Celebrimbor to spend _too_ much time lingering in the entrance hall, for the very simple reason that he was still standing in the doorway and he could smell the mold from here; it had grown no less overpowering in the several moments he had spent surveying the scene before him. He had no idea what color the rugs must have been originally (he would hazard a guess at red), and had little hope that even the most skilled at restoration of such items could have drawn out the original hue. Great strips of the rugs, those that had sat in the light let in by the windows, were bleached a dirty white. All the rugs were streaked up and down with dirt, and as the incredible reek of mold he had picked up on the moment he had stepped into the doorway indicated, the rugs were shot through with veins of black mold that Elrond could do nothing but eye warily. His mind was filled with visions of those veins shooting out towards him, hungrily seeking any open cuts on his skin through which they could have sent their noxious feelers.

…Yes, Elrond was aware that that was not how mold worked. He could hardly _stop_ his imagination from running away with him, especially when his mind was confronted with a possibility for harm to come to him.

The stone floors underneath these soiled, molding rugs (actually, Elrond wouldn’t be surprised if the rugs were more mold than fabric, at this point; the mold had clearly had a _long_ time to take hold) had the advantage of being a surface that could neither rot nor mold, but they were clearly filthy. Though perfectly smooth (had they shone when they were still cared for regularly? Were they reflective, once upon a time? Elrond could well imagine floors so highly-polished he could use them as a mirror when he brushed his hair, and now, look at it.), they were so caked with dirt and grime that it looked for a moment as if the floor was the bedrock itself, completely untreated.

At first glance, the only thing that possessed even the faintest echo of the glitter that must once have dazzled the eye of all visitors to Himring Castle was the glittering dust motes, bobbing back and forth in the gusts of wind that found their way through the windows. So when something else began to glint, naturally, Elrond took notice.

Amon Ereb had not possessed any tapestries, you know. Elrond would later learn that this was highly unusual for even the most meager of castles, but when he was taken to Amon Ereb, all he had known was a refugee camp in the Lisgardh and the hardscrabble life there. Any thread and cloth to find itself in the hands of weavers and other workers of textiles was going to go to making clothing and bedding. The camp, being in such a state of privation, would have regarded any _other_ use for cloth and thread the height of wasteful frivolity.

Elrond had not really become familiar with tapestries until he was an adult, and to hear certain people moan about it, the best of the weavers who had come over the Helcaraxë into Ennor had either been slain in Gondolin, perished with the fall of Thargelion, or drowned when the Rodyn broke Beleriand into a hundred thousand pieces. Those who constantly bemoaned the deaths of the best of the weavers of the Exiles were also kind enough to elaborate on that, and tell Elrond that no, these tapestries he could find in the capital in Lindon were _far_ from the best that had ever been created.

Oh, the best tapestries in Arda were to be found in Tirion, the work of Míriel Þerindë, she who died and was then allowed to return to the land of the living _only_ because the Rodyn could not wrap their heads around the idea that marital problems could have some solution _other_ than consigning _someone_ to the Doomsman’s care for all time. (Sometimes, Elrond wondered what it was like to be a maker of tapestries, living in such a shadow as Míriel’s. Perhaps she was revered. Perhaps young weavers trying to make their mark cursed her name day and night.) The very best tapestries were thoroughly out of reach, now, but there had been tapestries in Beleriand that had almost rivaled her skill. Many of those who had been her kin by Cuiviénen had followed Fëanor to Ennor, and they had brought all of their skills with them.

Like very nearly everything else, the glory and splendor of their skills had now run to ruin and drowning. Elrond counted himself lucky that he did not have too many opinions one way or another on tapestries. Just listening to the people who moaned to him about it, he had a feeling he would be spending a lot more time gnashing his teeth if he did.

Elrond liked a nice tapestry. He could appreciate the artistry of them, the amount of time that had been put into their making, and when they were beautiful, he could stand there and look at them, drinking in each and every detail in his own time, eyes hunting for the intricacies and the little touches that elevated the artwork of this tapestry over that of its neighbors. He did not have too many emotions about them, one way or another. But he did _notice_ them.

And he noticed when they were wound with shining, glittering thread.

As the floors were lined with rugs, the walls of the entrance hall were lined with tapestries, and likely for the same purpose. You needed windows to let in some natural light, but that did not mean that the designer or designers had abandoned altogether the idea of keeping the chamber warm. (At the same time that he noticed the tapestries, Elrond found his eye drawn also to the sconces affixed to the walls. They were spaced as to avoid burning too near to the tapestries, and many of them had fallen from the walls in the time since the castle was last occupied, but of those Elrond could still see clinging to the stone, they numbered in the dozens, easily. The torches that would have burned in those sconces would also have provided much-needed warmth.) The fortress might have been meant as a defense against Angband, but people still had to _live_ here.

Elrond was to understand that weavers typically put rather more effort into tapestries than into rugs—a _lot_ more, in certain cases. While rugs, even the most ornate of them, were meant to be walked on, and it was entirely possible that the people who were doing the walking might never think to look _down_ , tapestries were meant to looked at and admired, and thus, there was generally the desire to make it something truly _worthy_ of being looked at and admired. There were tales of apprentice tapestry-makers who spent years, even decades, working on their masterpiece, trying to get every last detail _just right_ —and if that meant they had to undo the last year’s work to adjust one figure two inches to the left, the sheer amount of repetition involved ensured that, after a while, they no longer needed to conduct a chart to see just where everything needed to go.

Perhaps, if so much that had happened had not come to pass, if Beleriand yet lived and there was peace between the House of Thingol and the House of Fëanor, and there was another highly-improbable, well-nigh impossible in this scenario, sequence of events that enabled Elrond and Elros to be born, Elrond could have visited this place in its splendor. If he had been the grandson or nephew of a king, rather than the son of a queen; if he had been the great-grandson of a king, rather than the grandson of a lady who should have always been heir, but only became queen in desolation. If the Sons of Fëanor had been seven, rather than two. If Fingolfin was still High King of the Ñoldor, or if Fingon yet drew breath and called himself ‘king.’ Perhaps then, he would have paused and stared at the tapestries for long moments, drinking in their splendor with ravenous hunger.

He was staring at them now, but it was not with hunger, so much as it was with the headache-inducing curiosity of trying to make out shapes where none were readily visible.

The reek was so tremendous that Elrond would never have hoped to pinpoint all of its sources, but he did not think the tapestries were as thoroughly eaten up with mold as were the rugs. Perhaps the weavers have woven in charms as well as thread and cloth, or perhaps they were simply more out of the damp. (It was probably the former explanation that would be proven truth, honestly—the walls were most likely soaked after even a gentle shower, to say nothing of what the spring thaw would mean for the walls and everything on them.) Instead, it was the moths that had had their way with the tapestries, leaving holes so great that, in some cases, the tapestries were more _hole_ than _tapestry_. They were moth-eaten, and dirty, and many of them hung in the light and were thus so badly faded that the cloth might as well have been deliberately bleached—

And it was that same light that had drawn Elrond’s attention to the gold and silver thread shot through many of the tapestries hung up here.

Perhaps less mindful of the mold than he should have been—no, _definitely_ less mindful than he should have been—Elrond finally stepped out of the doorway into the entrance hall itself. He hadn’t _completely_ taken leave of his senses—he skirted around the rugs, refusing to set foot on them, even when that meant having to go far out of his way in a circuitous path to a series of tapestries where Elrond had seen the threads shining. Celebrimbor was following after him at a more sedate pace, his footsteps ringing out on the stone. Elrond did not look back to him, did not look to see if Celebrimbor was trying to stop him from wandering too deep into a chamber positively bristling with mold, if Celebrimbor was drinking in the first sight in _well_ over a century of a place he had from time to time called his home, if Celebrimbor was watching _him_ drink in the sight of the place Elrond intended to mine as much knowledge out of as possible, the place Elrond intended to use to make a new reputation for himself and shake off the old one like a moth-eaten cloak.

At one point, he could feel eyes boring into the back of his head. Elrond gritted his teeth, did not turn back and look, and spent the rest of the time it took him to reach the series of tapestries he wished to more closely scrutinize trying to shake off the prickling sensation that had overtaken his skin.

When he drew closer, Elrond was able to confirm for himself what he had already suspected from first sight. What he had seen was not simply metallic-colored thread, spun from wool or silk or whatever other material the weavers might have seen fit to employ, but actual thread of gold and silver, woven in to the cloth around it, so thoroughly integrated that had the light not hit it just so, Elrond was not certain it would have caught his eye so soon.

Cloth of gold and silver was not something Elrond saw a lot of in Lindon. Gil-galad thought it gaudy, and though he might not be the authoritative voice on fashion in the royal court (there were many Sindar whom Elrond was convinced would have seen taking fashion cues from such a personage as the High King of the Ñoldor as a betrayal of everything they had ever loved before everything they ever loved sank below the Sea), he was certainly a voice of some _influence_. Thranduil liked to wear cloth of gold in the autumn, and Elrond like to stare at his robes and wonder just how much he could sell them for if the kingdom ever found itself short of funds. Speculation on just how heavy the robes were and just how badly Thranduil was sweating under them flitted through Elrond’s mind on occasion, as well.

Personally, Elrond agreed a lot more with Gil-galad than he did with Thranduil. Such displays of wealth had always struck him as gaudy at best, and downright tacky at worst, like parading a feast before a crowd of starving people and telling them that they were not allowed to eat it. Elrond would hardly say _no_ to fine clothes; he’d had enough of rough, scratchy wool to last him an eternity. But there was something called _subtlety_ that, when it came to his manner of dress, he actually possessed some knowledge, unlike Thranduil, to whom the concept of subtlety was not only foreign, but most likely reviled as _obviously_ some harbinger of the Enemy. Elrond wasn’t going to go around wearing clothing that glittered in the sunlight.

He’d never seen cloth of gold or silver thread in a tapestry before. It… it looked considerably less gaudy or tacky in a tapestry than it did in an article of clothing. Elrond could not call it beautiful. Not really, not when he could not even make out the images around the glittering threads. But its presence here was more rightful than in a cape or a tunic or a gown or a robe.

“What are you looking at?”

Celebrimbor’s voice sounded very close to Elrond’s ear, and he could not quite restrain himself from jumping, though he would have dearly _liked_ to. He glared lightly at Celebrimbor, before he remembered the _last_ thing he had said to Celebrimbor and that glare shriveled into cringing mortification that drove him to avert his gaze once more. “What else could I be looking at, here?” he asked peevishly. “There is very little on the wall that could draw the eye but this.” And here, he was not so reckless as to actually _touch_ the tapestry—he could make out some spots of mold scattered across what cloth had not been eaten up by moths, thank you very much—but Elrond did point his finger as close as he could to a particularly thick vein of gold thread, the better to ensure that Celebrimbor would not be able to misconstrue, innocently or otherwise, what it was that Elrond was pointing out.

And that tactic had paid off, for Celebrimbor’s keen eyes fixated on the gold threads immediately. “Ah, that. Do you know, I think there may have been looters through here, after all? Many of these tapestries had pearls and other precious stones sewn into them, and I no longer see a single one.” He cracked a slight smile, something that wobbled on his mouth and put off no light whatsoever. “Though those looters may well have been magpies. There was a small forest nearby the hill before the Bragollach. I remember it being thick with magpies; they used to get into all manner of skirmishes with the ravens. Come to think of it, the ravens might have had a hand in this, as well. Or would it be a talon?”

“We can debate that later,” Elrond muttered. “But… but jewels? Really?”

“Oh, yes. The tapestries in Lindon are rather drab by comparison. Perhaps in time, the kingdom’s wealth will grow enough that jewels can be pinned to tapestries once more—my father had me make the clips used to fix them to the thread as a child when he wanted me to practice delicate work—but until then, I do not think the tapestries will ever the equal of what hung in Himring and Nargothrond and Thargelion, or even in Barad Eithel and Minas Tirith. After all, if you have the stones, and they can be used to the weaver’s advantage when they are fashioning a tapestry, why should they _not_ be incorporated into the work?”

Elrond let a small huff of breath, not quite a laugh, rather too disbelieving for that, escape his mouth, as he murmured, “Why, indeed?” He peered more closely at a nearby vein of silver, frowning. “Do you know, I would have expected silver to have tarnished after all this time? I know there are charms and incantations you can lay on them to slow the process, but I’ve never heard of any that could hold for this long without the silver starting to show any tarnishing at all.”

Celebrimbor raised an eyebrow. “That’s not silver, Elrond.”

“What? What else could it be, then?”

The faintly teasing, slightly less faintly testing look that crept over Celebrimbor’s face was one that Elrond suspected he would quickly learn to despise. At the very least, even if loathing did not enter into his reactions, he was fairly certain that temper _would_. “I believe I have mentioned before that relations between Himring and Tumunzahar and Gabilgathol were quite warm. Gabilgathol in particular did a great deal of trade with Khazad-dûm.”

Elrond’s frown deepened as he rooted through his mind, questioning: _Khazad-dûm?_ Though he was not possessed of the same antipathy regarding the Hadhodrim as were many of his Sindarin fellows in the court, Elrond could not say that he paid much attention to their affairs. It was not one of his duties in court; he had many other matters that demanded his attention as a matter of duty, and many more matters that demanded his attention as a matter of personal interest and curiosity.

The Hadhodrim, at least the ones yet residing in the Ered Luin, seemed also quite content for the Edhil to keep their noses out of their affairs. There was trade between the Edhil of Lindon and the Hadhodrim of the Ered Luin, but that was where the relationship began _and_ ended. They had no ambassador in Gil-galad’s court; Elrond had never heard of Gil-galad sending an ambassador to any court the Hadhodrim might have had in their court, such as it was.

Khazad-dûm _was_ a name Elrond had heard once or twice, but he was struggling to remember the context. The name, the name, that would have been ‘Hadhodrond’ in Sindarin, ‘Dwarves’ Mansions.’ A kingdom of the Hadhodrim, then? One that had been or currently was greater in stature than Nogrod and Belegost in their glory?

For now, Elrond was going to assume that the latter supposition was true, and then dig up any book he could find on Hadhodrond when they returned to the capital, the better to seal up this gap in his knowledge. He might not have spared much thought to the affairs of the Hadhodrim, but Elrond did _not_ like being caught flat-footed this way. Spare him from having to stare at someone like a deer caught out by a hunter, ever again, not if he didn’t absolutely have to.

“Alright. So Belegost did trade with Hadhodrond. What does that have to do with this?”

The left-hand edge of Celebrimbor’s lips began to twitch. “There is another metal that looks like silver, you know. It is like to silver in appearance, but fairer, and much, much harder, if treated correctly. It does not tarnish or dim; age cannot touch it, no matter the conditions it is left in, for how many years.”

Elrond stared at him a moment longer, not comprehending. Then, comprehension hit him like a house falling on him, and he gawked at the silvery veins in the tapestry with undisguised shock. “Not _mithril_?!”

There could be no mistaking Celebrimbor’s expression for anything but smug. “Indeed, it is. Maedhros received a large gift of mithril from the Lord of Gabilgathol to seal the alliance between the House of Fëanor and the Kasari of Beleriand. It was put to many uses, and this was one of them.”

Elrond would take it back. This was a truly _astonishing_ display of the wealth of Himring, though he would allow that it was marginally less tacky than parading a feast in front of a crowd of starving people who weren’t allowed to eat it, if only because people couldn’t actually _eat_ mithril.

And if this was what he found in the _entrance hall_ , just imagine what could be found deeper into the fortress.

“But that’s incredible.” Elrond could not remember the last time he had felt such wonder as what had his eyes riveted upon the mithril veins glittering in the moth-eaten, mold-ridden tapestry before him. “What else is waiting for us—“

The words shriveled into nothingness, as the embarrassment that had gripped him just a few minutes earlier returned. Asking questions of him, when just a few minutes prior, he had snapped at Celebrimbor for doing the same with him? There had been a time for that, certainly. There had been a time to put his foot down and finally close the issue. It had not been here, not now.

And Elrond had not wanted for Celebrimbor to think—

He’d not wanted to push him away so thoroughly as all that, so thoroughly as suggested by…

But when Elrond finally looked back at Celebrimbor, the expression on his face was such that if Elrond did not know better, he would have sworn that they had never had that conversation at all. “If it pleases you—“ apprehension came out in his voice, but Elrond did not think it had anything to do with him. Not after all else Elrond had seen from him this day. “—I can show you more.”

For the life of him, Elrond could not determine whether this was meant as some sort of peace offering. But he was going to choose not to let that matter. Not when he was here, and he’d had such an enticing glimpse of what Himring potentially had waiting for him, if its treasure stores were yet intact, and Celebrimbor was offering to _show them_ to him.

Elrond nodded firmly. “It would.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Anor** —the Sindarin name for the Sun  
>  **Edhil** —Elves (singular: Edhel) (Sindarin)  
>  **Eldar** —‘People of the Stars’ (Quenya); a name first given to the Elves by Oromë when he found them by Cuiviénen, but later came to refer only to those who answered the summons to Aman and set out on the March, with those who chose to remain by Cuiviénen coming to be known as the Avari; the Eldar were composed of these groups: the Vanyar, Ñoldor (those among them who chose to go to Aman), and the Teleri (including their divisions: the Lindar, Falmari, Sindar and Nandor).  
>  **Elenna** —‘Starwards’ (Quenya); a name of Númenor, derived from the guidance of Eärendil given to the Edain on their initial voyage to Númenor at the beginning of the Second Age  
>  **Ennor** —Middle-Earth (Sindarin)  
>  **Hadhodrim** —a Sindarin name for the Dwarves, ultimately adapted from the Khuzdul  
>  **Helcaraxë** —the Grinding Ice (Quenya); the bridge of ice between Araman and Middle-Earth in the far north of the world. Morgoth and Ungoliant escaped to Middle-Earth by this road after destroying the Two Trees. Later, after the burning of the ships at Losgar, the Noldorin exiles abandoned on the other side of the sea traveled to Middle-Earth by this road at great risk to themselves.  
>  **Iathrim** —the Sindar of Doriath  
>  **Ithil** —the Sindarin name for the Moon; of the Sun and the Moon, it is the elder of the two vessels, lit by Telperion’s last flower; in an early version of ‘Of the Sun and Moon and the Hiding of Valinor’ was said to be “the giver of visions” (The Lost Road 264). As this form is very similar to ‘Isil’, the Quenya form (which is likely to be its original form, as the vessel of the Moon was made in Aman), it is likely that ‘Ithil’ was adapted from ‘Isil’; all I can suppose is that the Valar got in contact with Melian at some point during the First Age to share information.  
>  **Kasari** —a common name for the Dwarves among the Noldor, adapted from the Khuzdul Khazâd (singular: Kasar) (Quenya)  
>  **Laegrim** —the Green-Elves of Ossiriand (singular: Laegel) (plural: Laegil; Laegrim is class-plural term); the division of the Nandor who followed Denethor, son of Lenwë; the name was imposed upon them by the Sindar, because of the lush forests of their land, because of their especial love for the forests and waters of their land, and because the Laegrim often dressed in green as camouflage  
>  **Lisgardh** —A marshy region by the Mouths of Sirion, a land of reeds that grow man-high and dense as a forest. Its name in earlier drafts was ‘Arlisgion,’ translated in The Book of Lost Tales 2 as “the place of reeds” (155).  
>  **Rodyn** —Valar (singular: Rodon) (Sindarin): a common Sindarin name for the Valar


	11. Chapter Eleven

Celebrimbor was more than willing to show him some nearby chambers, but only after an agreement that they would not return to the entrance hall except to enter and leave the castle, and to that, Elrond was perfectly willing to agree. If they tried to camp there, Elrond had visions of them waking from sleep with their skin discolored with soft, mottled black spots, and their lungs aching and screaming, but unable to draw a proper breath for all the spores that had attached themselves to the walls and then bloomed so riotously in the wet, warm, dark environment they had found. If Elrond was ever to die, he thought he would rather not die in a manner so wont to foment nightmares.

(He did wonder if the odor was beginning to affect his judgment and his imagination, just a little. The longer he stood in the entrance hall, breathing in the reek, the more his head swam. That had to have an effect after a while, did it not?)

So they hastily made their way across the floor of the entrance hall to one of many sets of doors on the opposite end of the chamber from the main doors. Just as with the main doors, these sets of doors, though all made of wood, were yet intact. They were clearly not in the state that they had been while the castle was yet-occupied—Elrond sincerely doubted that doors in such a splendid castle as this must once have been would have been allowed to accumulate so many splinters—but they did not crumble under the touch of Celebrimbor’s hands, and even that was worth remarking upon.

Of course, there weren’t going to be any truly spectacular treasure troves just off of the entrance hall. You wanted to keep those towards the center of any castle in which they were kept. Everything towards the edges, especially towards the front door, should be a preview, should be a teaser, should foreshadow would could be found by those enterprising enough to search further, to look in every nook and cranny, but not give the whole game away, all by itself.

At least, that was how Elrond regarded it. He would admit that he did not think his opinion was likely to be universally held.

As it was, Celebrimbor led him first to an armory that had been located just off of the entrance hall. Celebrimbor mentioned that it was located there in case of an attack, so that anyone nearby who was unarmed and vulnerable to attackers could have _something_ to defend themselves with. Personally, Elrond was filing this away as another sign of Maedhros’s paranoia, even before his life was rendered wrack and ruin and all that was left was—

But those thoughts should be pushed away. They should be _pushed away_ , and Elrond shoved them down with a hand that was not shaking, not at all.

“I don’t expect there to be much remaining here,” Celebrimbor remarked, as he pushed open the door. His hand was shaking a little once more, and his voice had begun to wobble in time. “If there is _anything_ those evacuating from the castle during the Nirnaeth would have taken with them, it would be every weapon not nailed down to the floor. Actually—“ the laugh that bubbled up in his throat had a jitter that rendered what should have been a sweet sound to harsh discordance “—there was probably some effort put into liberating the weapons that _were_ nailed down, if only so that the Orcs could not have them if they found some way up here.”

“But there may be something,” Elrond hoped aloud. Even if that something was only those weapons nailed too fast to be removed in a hurry.

“Aye, indeed. There may be something.”

This armory, even if it was only an auxiliary armory intended to provide weapons to unarmed occupants in the event of an emergency, was rather more what Elrond had expected from such a grim fortress as Himring. The chamber was large, but the only natural light came through arrow-slit windows stationed high up on the walls, and the walls were considerably rougher stone than what Elrond had seen in the entrance hall, even after years upon years of neglect.

There were a few sconces—plenty of sconces, actually, and Elrond was beginning to wonder if Edhil who had spent countless years in seemingly eternal light might not have something against shadow—but they were all empty, leaving behind nothing that could have been ignited. Had the torches been taken with the evacuating residents? Had they rotted over time? Had they been pilfered by looters? That was a question, certainly, and one Elrond would attend to in time, but for now, the light sources he had to work with were a far more pressing matter.

Without a word, Celebrimbor brought out his globe of a blue-shining lamp and held it aloft, so that all shadows were banished in waves of glimmering light that struck against the walls like intangible sea foam striking against the cliffs of the Gulf of Lhûn—when the moonlight hit the foam just right, it _did_ look as if lit from within. To see the light shining here, within such a place—

They were alone, and the footsteps Elrond heard ringing on the stone floor were his own, Celebrimbor’s, and the phantom of his memories.

Regardless of his sentiments, the lamp did good work lighting up the darkness, and phenomenal work lighting up a reasonably small place, as even a spacious armory must stand described when compared to the bowels of Himring Hill. When the lamp was unveiled, any difficulty Elrond had in making out the room, its dimensions, and its contents was quickly extinguished.

Living up to Celebrimbor’s suppositions, the armory was largely empty, most of the weapons gone. Whether they had been taken by the evacuators, carried off by Orcs, or pilfered by later looters, Elrond could not say. He could only say that the fortress bore none of the signs of defilement he would have expected, had Orcs ever laid their malignant hands upon it. Elrond doubted the signs would have healed or faded, even in the long years since the Orcs of the North last lived to terrorize the people of Beleriand.

So. Though Elrond might be assailed by truly monumental mold infestations, he would at least not have to contend with the foulness the Orcs left behind them wherever they went. There was that, at least.

And as it turned out, Elrond, while carrying out a cursory inspection of the armory, discovered that ‘largely empty’ did not equate to ‘entirely empty.’

Oh, it wasn’t very much. Elrond had seen more splendid weapons in the camps of the Fëanorians as a child, and by that time, Elrond thought they would have been bartering their belongings for food, had there been any community with food to spare that would have lowered themselves to do trade with those who were Kinslayers three times over. To the people evacuating the fortress, the rack of daggers he found propped against a far corner of the armory had apparently not amounted to much, either. But it was more than Elrond would have expected to find in an armory in a castle which, the last time it had been occupied, it was occupied by people who were expecting to be assailed on all sides by foes once they left it behind them. It was a _start_ , and that was something.

Well, Elrond had something to start with, something that could actually be looked at and carried away from Himring without any undue risk to the ones who carried it, and he had certain responsibilities that went along with that.

Out came something he had packed with him, and left alone all this time, for fear of running out of the materials before ever having occasion to use them as he’d meant to.

You hadn’t expected Elrond to spend three days in Himring without taking _notes_ , had you?

Elrond had spent a great deal of time in his life writing with the parchment pressed against his knee. Other scholars might scoff at it, but when you had no better surface than your own body, and you were fearful the stone floor was so rough that it would damage your parchment, you made do with what you had. He had learned early on not to be picky. As long as he actually had parchment to write on, and he didn’t have to open a vein to get his hands on ink, he had nothing to complain about.

 _‘Eight daggers, each with blades ranging between six and eight inches in length. Sheathes are made of leather.’_ Though that leather was cracked and brittle, to Elrond’s eyes visibly crumbling. _‘Blades are made of’_

Elrond took the dagger with the most intact-looking sheath, wincing when that sheath nonetheless began to crumble upon contact with his hands, and slid the sheath back gingerly, trying to get a good look at the blade. Though lightly spotted with rust, the blade was far more intact than Elrond could reasonably have expected, with the dagger left abandoned and unmaintained for so long. He could feel the whisperings of magic in the blade—a simple charm trying to ward off rust, he thought; the sorts of charms that were put in place to guide the point of a dagger towards a vulnerable area on a target’s body tended to make themselves heard more loudly under scrutiny than these delicate whispers. He held the blade up to the light, squinting, before resuming his writing:

_‘steel. Lightly rusted; could easily be repaired. Edge is still sharp.’_

It was a good start. Elrond did hope that would not be where it ended, though. He did not think he could make his reputation on a set of daggers that were in surprisingly good shape after having been abandoned for more than a century. But it _was_ a start. He forced down a smile, fearful that any smile on his face would just appear giddy and over-eager. It was a start, and he was _choosing_ to believe that it could go far, far further than just this.

-0-0-0-

They had three days, and the light was still good, and even in rooms where the light was _not_ good, they had Celebrimbor’s lamp, so Elrond was reasonably content to make slow progress on this first day. It was important that the report he made to Gil-galad was not a cursory glance over what he had found in Himring, that there were no inaccuracies, and that if there was something truly spectacular in a chamber he inspected, that it not go overlooked by him, only to be found by a later crew.

The next room in the tour was a salon not far from the armory—a strain of dark amusement unfurled within Elrond at the thought of two chambers sitting so close to one another, but that was the tone of the Siege of Angband and the Long Peace, was it not? The Siege, before it was broken, was a time of peace when the Exiles flourished in Ennor and sought to make their marks in more ways than just by keeping it safe from the machinations of Morgoth and his henchmen. The Exiles were there to stay, and why should they not make their new homes as glorious as their olds ones had been? Alright, so there was no realm that could ever surpass Valinor in bliss or beauty—or so Elrond was told, and honestly, the older he got, the more convinced he was that the tales were at least _somewhat_ exaggerated. He could not believe that any realm on the face of this earth could be as unearthly peaceful and lovely and prosperous as Valinor was supposed to be, and by this point, even if it had been once, it likely wasn’t anymore; all of those tales predated both the Darkening, and the Unrest that had precipitated it. But though the tales of Valinor’s splendor might have been at least somewhat exaggerated, it was clear that that realm’s prosperity and beauty had surpassed any realm in Ennor at the time, even that of Doriath, and the Exiles saw no reason why they should not try to replicate that beauty and prosperity, as best they could.

(Elrond could name at least one large reason why this could be expected not to end well: the curse laid upon the Exiles by the Doomsman. The Doomsman likely looked upon the Exiles’ attempt to make comfortable, admirable lives for themselves in Beleriand as an extra bonus to the wrack and ruin and death he would wreak upon them all. Elrond could only imagine how much he had gloated when it finally came time to tear down Gondolin, which must have been a special affront to he who believed that even the blameless descendants of those who had spilled blood in Alqualondë deserved nothing more or less than death. And the fortresses of the Sons of Fëanor…

Elrond had had much experience of how the Doom of the Ñoldor would always, _always_ find a path in to the dreams and plans of the Sons of Fëanor. He had known of one thing only that had held greater sway over them, had known of only one set of chains that bound them more tightly, and no matter how he had prayed, no matter how he had pleaded, in the end, it was not enough to—)

The Exiles had wanted beauty, wanted comfort, wanted to build something that they could be proud of and could teach their children, born away from blissful Valinor, everything that they had been taught. They wanted to give their children knowledge, and though their methods of dispensing it might have been questionable, they had wanted to give the Sindar and the Nandor and the Hadhodrim and, when they had shown up, the Edain all the knowledge that had been theirs in Valinor. But there was more than that that they wanted, and there were matters of duty to attended to, besides. The Exiles had taken it upon themselves to do war on one of the Rodyn, and to protect the rest of the land from his malice. The Exiles wished to rid the land of one of the Rodyn, and if there was anything Elrond knew about the Exiles, it was that they never did anything by half-measures.

They weren’t big on separating the one from the other, either.

So yes, this was amusing, but on reflection, not particularly surprising. Once Elrond was able to put aside the disconnect between the Maedhros he had known and the idea of a salon, a place whose only purpose was for leisure, existing in his own former residence (he had been putting aside the disconnect; he was putting aside the disconnect; he would be putting aside the disconnect for some time to come), the existence of the salon, apparently one of many, by Celebrimbor, was no longer any sort of surprise at all.

Those who had picked the armory nearly dry had not been through this salon, apparently. Elrond had much more to note down here than he had in the armory, though what he was taking notes of was not in nearly such good shape as the rack of daggers.

The furniture was intact, technically, though Elrond would not have hazarded to _sit_ on it, thanks to the combination of dust, mold on the cloth covers, and the visible sag he could see in the middle of one of the larger sofas—if that wasn’t a probable indicator of the support structure for the cushions starting to rot straight through, Elrond wasn’t certain what was. No gold or silver or _mithril_ — _that_ , he was still trying to get over—thread woven into the brocaded covers, but the colors of cushion covers were still discernable, rich reds and greens and golden-yellows. The wood, though dull and faded, had clearly once been a deep, pinkish-red; kneeling down and taking a look at sections that had not been hit by light gave Elrond an equally tantalizing and frustrating look at what color the wood had been when the furniture was yet in use.

There were curtains over the windows (which were just as devoid of glass as the windows of the entrance hall had been), though given how thoroughly moth-eaten they were, perhaps ‘curtains’ was no longer quite the right word to describe them. What little wind could reach the windows here sent the remains of the curtains fluttering, and when the wind picked them up and pushed them forwards, Elrond was reminded of nothing so much as searching fingers, groping blindly in the dark for a light. But ravaged as they were, it was clear that in their time, they had been thick curtains, fit to block out all natural light. That gave Elrond some ideas of just what this salon had been used for, and he wasn’t certain which one amused him more, even if the amusement was dimmed by the same judgmental irritation that overtook him the morning after feasts, on those occasion when those around him had gotten drunk and were now facing the consequences, while he had drank very little, or had refused entirely to imbibe, and now had to deal with a gaggle of hungover Edhil. Those hungover Edhil being irritable at the best of times, the irritability levels in the room quickly achieved the sort of toxicity that even whole barrels of wine could never hope to rival.

On one of the tables, before a sagging couch, there was a hinged box of a delicate, pale-gray metal. Largely tarnished, what peeked out from behind the tarnish was highly reflective—so, most likely silver this time, rather than mithril. Elrond stared at it a long moment, oddly hesitant to reach out and open it, in spite of every reason why he was here, in spite of every last thing he hoped to gain from this trip and what he must do to grasp those things in his hands.

Old, abandoned castles were _for_ things like this. The dwelling-places of the great and the good did not have the same expectation of privacy as an abandoned house, and their belongings were more than just their belongings. He knew that, he _knew_ that. But now that he was confronted with this silver box, this relic of a more personal sort than the tapestries or the rack of daggers had been, he hesitated.

It was foolish to hesitate. Elrond set his jaw, reminding himself of this for every moment it took for him to come to stand before the table, trying not to block out the light too much as he reached out his hand towards the box. It was foolish to hesitate. In all likelihood, whoever had owned this box and whatever dwelled inside was dead. The only alternative was that the owner was right here in the room with him, and though Elrond had been paying little mind to Celebrimbor’s demeanor as he made his way through this room, he thought that Celebrimbor would have _said_ something by now, if that tarnished silver box belonged to him. Some exclamation about how he had lost it, or some request for Elrond not to open it, surely.

There was no barrier to Elrond opening the box, except for his own squeamishness. He would need to learn to put that aside if he wanted to get through this assignment with enough information to make it a success.

Elrond sucked a deep breath, reproached himself for forgetting, even for a moment, _why he was here_ , and opened the box.

Elrond did not know just what he had been expecting. A silver box in a salon could have contained any number of things. It could be a letter box that someone had been going through, trying to keep track of their correspondence. It could have held a set of glasses—they’d have to be very small glasses, but then, there were some kinds of alcohol that you did _not_ want to drink in large quantities—for drinking out of during small gatherings. It could have been a box of sweets that someone had brought down to this salon to share with anyone else who happened to be in the salon at the time, and the box had just sat forgotten when the call for evacuation came down.

The box did not contain any of those things. Elrond’s eyebrows arched upwards as the light hit the contents of the box, and the glitter of them practically hovered in the air around the box as he stepped back and let the light hit them in full. Of all the things he had been expecting, he had not been expecting the box to contain jewelry.

Later, just a little while later when he was writing his notes, Elrond would quickly give up on trying to figure out if it was men’s or women’s jewelry. He’d always had trouble with that—a necklace was a necklace, a bracelet was a bracelet, a brooch was a brooch, and a circlet was a circlet; how was he supposed to know if it was meant to be worn by a man or a woman or someone else entirely? Besides that, fashions differed so wildly between different cultures, and trends came and went with every decade or every other decade, and the Exiles in particular had never seen much of a need to differentiate. Their attitude was not entirely dissimilar from Elrond’s—a necklace was a necklace, a bracelet was a bracelet, a brooch was a brooch, a circlet was a circlet, and provided that the piece of jewelry in question was well-crafted and not an eyesore and matched well with the wearer’s clothes, who cared about the gender of the person wearing it? Dealing with Exilic jewelry, Elrond would limit himself to descriptions, and not make any speculation. He would probably turn out later to have been horribly, horribly wrong, anyways.

Elrond would quickly give up on trying to decide if it was men’s or women’s jewelry, but the few moments in which he entertained that question, it served its purpose well, distracting him from the more pressing question, the question that had reared up and wrapped itself around his mind in tight, squeezing coils. But the supposition could only last him a few moments, and the constriction of the _real_ question was too burdensome to ignore for more than that.

A box of jewelry was, by definition, an intensely personal possession. What was it doing in what was categorically a public space?

Elrond reached out with a tentative hand, brushing his fingertips against a long string of pearls—well, it wasn’t a string of _just_ pearls, so much as it was a string of alternating pearls and pink tourmaline beads—tracing the shape of an especially large pearl. The silk thread that bound the pearls and tourmaline beads together still seemed to be in decent shape. The pearls were cool to the touch; the tourmaline beads were even colder. The metal in the box, that which was not gold and thus could be touched by time, had fared far better than the box itself. There was no tarnishing on any of the silver or bronze or copper jewelry in the box; Elrond could make out no patina on the stray pieces of jewelry with electrum bases. The box was lined with velvet, and though it was visibly brittle, it was neither molded nor discolored.

Set into the jewelry were jewels of all kind. This was _not_ a particularly small box, and there was plenty there to spot. Besides pearls and tourmaline, there were rubies and diamonds and jet, chalcedony and sapphires and serpentine and spinel. There were even a few opal pieces in there, and every last word Elrond had ever heard on opals was that they weren’t really worth the effort of setting into jewelry, not unless you were dealing with very specific cuts and the jewel-smith in question was a _highly_ -skilled jewel-smith, and that even then, most jewel-smiths, even those who were acknowledged masters of their craft, regarded opals with about as much fondness as Elrond regarded a summons to attend at court while he was neck-deep in a particularly engrossing volume.

It was rich jewelry, splendid jewelry, and not the sort of jewelry that Elrond would have expected to find in a public salon, even if he had expected to find any jewelry in a public salon at all.

So why was it here?

Why leave it here? Why leave it here, instead of leaving it in one’s personal chambers, where it could be more easily claimed as one’s own, if there ever came the opportunity to return to Himring after the Nirnaeth? And why bring it down out of those personal chambers in the first place? Silver was not a lightweight metal, and even if it had been, all of this jewelry, when put together, would have amounted to a fair amount of weight all by itself. Elrond conducted a test of his own supposition, pressing the box lid closed once more and briefly lifting it off of the table, and found his own conclusions correct—this was not a box that someone would have just taken down out of their personal chambers on a whim, not unless they were _much_ stronger than he was. And even then, even if the box was relatively light to its carrier, the fineness of the jewelry, the delicacy of some of the pieces, would surely have made the owner think twice about removing it from its proper place.

His mind could summon a host of scenarios, a host of possible answers. A potential trade or purchase. A chance to show off a new piece of jewelry just commissioned. An opportunity to compare with someone else who had brought their jewelry down, and then taken it back to their chambers with them when they were done. But those answers were as dry and brittle as the velvet lining in the box, and to Elrond’s mind, even if they technically provided him with an answer, there was something about them that felt markedly incomplete.

Unless, by some chance, the owner of the jewelry box was yet living and was willing to expose themselves as a former resident of Himring by claiming it as their own, Elrond would never have the full story, here. He would never have the full story, and the shadows that gathered around his own speculation murmured mockery of his helplessness.

It was… It was all rather too intimate. (It was apparently time once more for Elrond to remind himself of where he was, of the fact that this was not someone’s private residence, and that items left out in public spaces for decades on end, when all of the possible owners were almost certainly dead, were not private items. Another thing he was likely going to have to be reminding himself over and over again, for as long as he was here.) One did not go through someone else’s jewelry, not unless they had a very specific relationship. Claiming that sort of intimacy for himself felt… It felt wrong. Elrond did not know how it could have felt any other way.

He was not a voyeur.

He had a sinking feeling that this assignment was going to try to make him into one.

And… and it was a shame, that most likely, the only people who could have claimed the jewelry in this box would be languishing in the Timeless Halls for millennia to come before the Doomsman, pitiless towards even the blameless descendants of those who had spilled blood at Alqualondë, could finally be moved to release them back into the world of the living. Jewelry was meant to be worn, and perhaps these pieces would be worn again in time, if it wasn’t decided that their place would reside within a display case in a museum, but it wouldn’t be the same. The jewelry might be worn again, but it would not be worn by the person they had been made for, by the person who had inherited it from a parent or a sibling or a cousin, by the person who had been gifted this jewelry by a friend or a suitor or a lover. They would be bereft.

(Elwing had had some jewelry, besides the Silmaril set into the Nauglamír. Bits and pieces of Nimloth’s jewelry that someone had managed to take from her personal chambers before leaving Doriath behind forever—and Elrond wondered still, to this day, just what that person had been doing rooting through his maternal grandmother’s jewelry, but whatever they might have originally planned for the jewelry, it had ended up in Elwing’s possession, instead.

There had been a string of pink pearls, in particular, that had been one of Elrond’s favorite toys as a very small child. Elwing had little care for what became of it—there was only one jewel to which she gave her love, and the rest were all dross—and he had been allowed to do whatever he liked with it, even when his antics had no doubt threatened to break the silk strings holding the pearls together and break the chain altogether.

He had no idea what had become of it after Elwing took off across the Sea. No one had ever produced it for either him or for Elros. No one had ever even mentioned it. Most likely, it was sitting at the bottom of the Sea, now, but sometimes… Sometimes, Elrond did wonder about it. Sometimes, he even caught himself wondering if his mother wondered about it. But that was an intimacy he would be forever reaching for, without ever feeling the brush of fingertips of another hand reaching out in response. Better to put it away.)

Well, Elrond would likely never have the owner of the jewelry before him, for even if that person was one day allowed out of the Timeless Halls, they would never again be allowed across the wide and fathomless waters of the Sea. But he was not entirely without recourse. A small chance it was, but Celebrimbor _had_ lived here off and on, and as best as Elrond could tell, he had been working with gems and precious metals since he was old enough to be allowed into a forge. If there was even the smallest chance that Celebrimbor could put a name to these pieces, could give Elrond something resembling a story, something that he could carry away…

Elrond straightened, looking Celebrimbor’s way, the question already on his lips. But as soon as he drank in the sight of Celebrimbor’s face, that question shriveled and died on his lips.

Celebrimbor was stationed by one of the windows, staring straight out into whatever courtyard or patch of green the windows looked out on. One hand was braced on the stone windowsill, made rough by time and wind and rain and sheer neglect; the other held the chain on which his lamp was strung, but loosely, so loosely, so that the lamp was resting against the floor, lighting up his boots and the underside of a nearby sofa. He never noticed Elrond’s scrutiny, giving Elrond plenty of time to scrutinize him.

Celebrimbor _was_ staring out of that window, and if Elrond had not been paying him much mind, he would have thought that he was intently staring at something in particular outside, but when Elrond peered more closely at his face, he could see none of the intense focus that he would have expected, had Celebrimbor been staring at anything in particular outside of the salon. He’d not known Celebrimbor to stare at things idly before, and he did not think that had changed, now. More likely than not, he was staring off into space, looking at nothing, looking without seeing.

And he was wholly unaware of Elrond’s looking at him, something that Elrond found more concerning as the moments dragged on. So Elrond took advantage of his obliviousness, and _looked_.

Perhaps he could have fooled himself into believing that Celebrimbor was simply bored, that there was no trouble upon him, but Elrond had been traveling in his company for long enough to know better of his silence. The hand he had placed on windowsill was not sitting still upon the stone. Periodically, the fingers picked up, nails raking against the stone, making a discordant scratching sound against the stone not loud enough to be a screech _only_ because Celebrimbor did not seem entirely cognizant of what he was doing, and was thus not putting his considerable strength into his hand. Against flesh, though, if that hand was against flesh, Elrond could only guess at the scratches that would have been scored. The strength of a focused mind and focused hand was different from the strength of a mind and body locked in abstraction, but that body, even locked in abstraction, was hardened and strengthened by near-daily work in the forge, and perhaps less recent, but still regular, exercise in the training grounds.

Elrond watched that hand, watched the way the fingers splayed out when they reached out to scratch the gray stone, watched the way bones danced beneath skin as the hand flexed, watched a thin little scar on the back of Celebrimbor’s hand ripple when the flesh beneath it moved. It was difficult to imagine such a hand locked tight around the hilt of a sword, even if Celebrimbor wore a short sword even now. Elrond doubted not that Celebrimbor could have wielded a sword to good effect—all of the House of Fëanor were famous (infamous) for their skill with the blade, and no one had ever named Celebrimbor as an exception to that rule—but he just could not imagine it.

He had felt that hand on his. It was a hand that felt too gentle, _incongruously_ gentle, for the ugly task of killing. Elrond did not think his or Elros’s hands had felt that way since before the first time. He did not know how Elros perceived things—and surely a king, even a king over a peaceful land, must regard killing in the name of defending his people in a different light than someone who did not have those sorts of obligations—but Elrond had never quite been able to look at himself, or his hands, in the same light, after they were first stained with Orc blood. Even if Celebrimbor had been uninvolved in the Kinslayings, he had still seen _battle_ ; there was not a single prince of the Ñoldor in the First Age who had not. And yet…

Elrond watched that hand. After a few moments, without him realizing it, watching had turned to staring, to imagining. He had felt that hand over top of his own, skin against skin. What would it feel like, he wondered, if it _traveled_ …

Elrond finally managed to stop those thoughts, but not before a hot flush had started crawling up his neck. He shoved them back down, angry and self-thwarted and still nursing an apprehensive, fluttering warmth in the pit of his stomach for some time to come, in spite of all that. This was not the time. Not the place, and not the time, and indecent to have such thoughts about someone who was clearly in a state of some agitation, anyhow.

Celebrimbor had been troubled for days. That much was obvious to Elrond, even if he did not display his trouble consistently, even if not always openly, even if there were times when he seemed back to his normal self. It was out in the open again, made plain by the scratching motion of his hand, by the slackness of the other, made plain by the sightless staring of his eyes, by the tightness of his jaws, by the quiver of his lips. Even if he would not acknowledge it to Elrond, even if he would not explain himself, it was all too apparent.

Out in the open, and apparently here to stay. As they moved on to the next chamber, that expression remained fixed on Celebrimbor’s face, jaw still tight, eyes still unfocused, lips still quivering slightly—Elrond kept watching for the brightness of tears to gather at the corners of his eyes, and every time he did not see them, he expected them all the more the next time he happened to check. He could speak in an even tone, but ‘tone’ might not have been the best word for it, considering how toneless all of his words were.

It was perhaps an hour later when Elrond finally hazarded to ask, a question that had become a common refrain and would no doubt become even more common, “Are you alright?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Celebrimbor asked in turn, while staring up at the ceiling of the hallway they had just entered as if he expected to see something clinging to the stones, ready to drop down onto him. “After all, this is the safest place in all of the Great Sea.”

Elrond tried to hear sarcasm in that remark. He tried to hear bitterness in it. Perhaps it would have been there to hear if he had been listening harder, or if he had known Celebrimbor better. But he could hear nothing in the words beyond the flat intonation of syllables, so lifeless that Elrond expected to see their dry husks clatter to the floor in Celebrimbor’s wake.

“Why indeed?” Elrond muttered, following after.

Here to stay, and unwilling to explain itself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Edain** —Men of the three houses (the Houses of Bëor, Hador and Haleth) who were faithful to the Elves throughout the First Age; after the War of Wrath they were gifted with the land of Númenor and became known as the Dúnedain; after the Akallabêth they established Arnor and Gondor (singular: Adan) (Sindarin)  
>  **Edhil** —Elves (singular: Edhel) (Sindarin)  
>  **Ennor** —Middle-Earth (Sindarin)  
>  **Hadhodrim** —a Sindarin name for the Dwarves, ultimately adapted from the Khuzdul Khazâd (singular: Hadhod) (Sindarin)  
>  **Rodyn** —Valar (singular: Rodon) (Sindarin): a common Sindarin name for the Valar


	12. Chapter Twelve

As soon as Elrond had marked the shift in Celebrimbor’s behavior as something permanent, at least for as long as they remained in Himring, he cursed himself for even thinking of such things, for it seemed that what he had noticed in another, he had brought down upon himself.

Elrond had not thought anything of it when they were still making their way towards the castle itself. When he was still drinking in his first sight, it was only natural for him to dwell on first impressions, and how they differed from what he had expected. If Elrond had received no firm description of the fortress of Himring in all his time reading through the histories of Beleriand, and what he saw did not match what he had expected, based on the disposition of its late master, it was natural to remark upon that, even if only to himself. Part of the way he learned anything at all was by thinking, so why not think?

But thinking had slowly drifted to dwelling, and the part of himself that did not want to dwell, did not want to feel _anything_ at all when he stood in Himring was so bitterly locked in conflict with the part of himself that wanted nothing more than to sink into dwelling, to sink into the past and never emerge from it again, that Elrond was left with nothing to do but dwell upon everything that took roost in his mind when he stood within these walls, and be ruled by every emotion imposed. There was little he could do but try not to drown.

Maedhros had lived here. Maedhros had lived here for decades upon centuries, and Maglor had spent a fair number of those years here with him, but it was Maedhros who had been master here, Maedhros who had guided the design of the fortress when it was wrought, Maedhros who had kept watch over the North from the tallest towers of Himring Castle. Elrond kept looking for some sign of the mark he had made in this place, some sign that could have been interpreted as the influence he had had over the stones and their placement, something tangible, something he could have carried with him, in his mind, if not on his person. He just… just kept looking.

Maedhros as Elrond had known him had been a man unmoored. Oh, Maglor had been unmoored as well, but even as a child, Elrond could easily mark out which of these two remaining Sons of Fëanor was more well-tethered to the concerns of the mundane and practical world. Maglor had been unmoored; Maedhros had been unmoored and _uprooted_ , ready to fly away into the air the first time a strong gale came for him. He had, in the end. His Oath had been stronger than will, stronger than fear, stronger than hate, and stronger than love. It had crushed those things to dust, these things which had long since ceased to serve as roots and were nothing but the desiccated, stumpy remains of all that he had once been, glory run to nothing, and crushed him along with it, leaving nothing for even the humblest of paupers’ graves. The Oath had been stronger than everything. It had ripped his mind clean out of the world.

Elrond had always had trouble imagining the noble lord of Himring, but now that he stood in Himring, that was all he could do. All he could do was think of the image he held in memory, as clear as if he was yet a child in that roving camp, and try to imagine the changes if the roots were whole again, if they were alive and reaching into the ground, if they were yet things that could provide any sustenance at all.

Maedhros whole was probably impossible. Elrond knew the history. He could not guess at just what juncture it had been that the cracks first appeared, but he could not imagine that what had dwelled here had ever been Maedhros, _whole_. To get Maedhros whole, Elrond would have needed to peer back into times when only one half of the world was lit up. He could not imagine what Maedhros had been in the bliss of Valinor, and honestly, he had never felt much interest in making the attempt. Maedhros in Valinor was so foreign that whoever he was, he must inevitably bear no resemblance whatsoever to the Maedhros Elrond had known. If he was to try to know a version of Maedhros whom he could even vaguely recognize as the same man as the man he had known, he would have to look forward a long ways from the bliss and seemingly eternal light of Valinor.

Maedhros whole was probably—no, _certainly_ —impossible, but most of the people in Elrond’s life were not really what he could call _whole_. His mother had not been whole. Eärendil likely had not been as well. Maglor had not been. Gil-galad put it aside with the grace of an expert, but Elrond knew there were cares and griefs he yet carried with him from that vanished Age and vanished land. Galadriel would let it show to no one, but she had lost the vast majority of her family, with not even their bones to remember them by. Thranduil drank a little too intensely for a man who had no ghosts. And Celebrimbor…

Elrond was getting an eyeful of Celebrimbor.

But he was thinking of _Maedhros_. He was _dwelling_ on Maedhros.

Elrond had come to Himring looking for treasure, even if that treasure was not quite the sort that fortune hunters would risk themselves for. He’d come here looking for treasure of the sort that could open the pathways of his future and keep them from all running to the capital in a tight little circle, and here he found himself chasing after ghosts. Even the slightest echo of a ghost, something that could serve as the bridge between the lord of Himring and the man Elrond had known would have given him some sort of answer.

Not a complete answer. Elrond did not think he could hope for such, now. Complete answers were for a time when this fortress was not in ruins, when Beleriand was not in ruins, when Beleriand was not drowning, when Beleriand was not drowned. Elrond’s problem now was the same problem facing every single person even remotely interested in any facet of the history of the First Age: there was not nearly enough left for piecing together a complete, coherent narrative.

So here Elrond was, chasing after the echo of a ghost. Here he was, _uselessly_ chasing after the echo of a ghost, uselessly chasing after something that could provide him no comfort, give him no real answers, give him nothing he could carry with him to the future that would not have been more chains, weighing him down.

It was in the past. Elrond had left it behind— Alright, so that was not exactly how things had gone. Alright, so Elrond had not left that past behind so much as he had had it ripped away from him. Alright, so he had had hardly been _happy_ about having it ripped away from him, so he would have done anything to keep them from—

It was in the past, and could take him nowhere in the present, and less than nowhere in the future. This was no world for the memory of Fëanor and his scions. This was a world where you had to leave those things behind if you wanted to be any part of society. They were in the past. They were a part of the past that no one wanted to remember, and considering how little any part of the past anyone wanted to remember at this point—oh, yes, there had been some parts that were glorious, but the glory was so little of what had actually happened, one day of glory for every ninety-nine days without, and to hear some of the singers sing, you would think the glory had been all there was—that was saying something.

Elrond could not bring them out of the past. Most of the time, he did not _want_ to bring them out of the past. Keeping them in the past, keeping them _distant_ , the emotions were also distant (except when they weren’t), something blunt, rather than something with sharp enough of an edge to cut. Elrond could not bring them out of the past. Maglor was vanished out of the sight of all who lived on this earth. Maedhros was dead. He could not wrench them out of the past. The past was beyond him. Dwelling there was folly. Dwelling there would drown him as Beleriand had been drowned—it would be as good as wading into the water as Elwing had waded in, walking and walking until the water was over his head and flooding into his lungs.

Elrond could not bring them out of the past. It was beyond him. He did not want to. He did not want to. (Except for the times when he did.)

He could not bring them out of the past, and yet, when Elrond was here, he was chasing ghosts. He was searching for Maedhros in rough stone and in discovered trinkets that had likely never belonged to him in the first place, potentially had never been looked on by him. He just…

He did want to understand better. There were times when Elrond thought that if he understood better, it would be easier to put them in the past, and not be bothered anymore—like putting childhood toys away into a chest he would leave in the back corner of his wardrobe, if Elrond had any childhood toys left to put away in such a manner.

Elrond did want to understand better, but he wasn’t going to gain understanding from _this_. He wasn’t going to find understanding from shaking away imagined footsteps and voices, wasn’t going to find any peace from dwelling on—

“There were blackberries out past the town.”

Elrond nearly— No, there was no ‘nearly’ about it. He jumped what felt like several inches, though he never felt his feet leave the ground, when he heard Celebrimbor’s voice sound for the first time in… He’d lost track.

The irritation, or even anger, that Elrond should have felt at being startled in such a way, when Celebrimbor could _surely_ have gotten his attention in a manner less jarring, never came. His heart was pounding in his ears and he was still trying to tell himself that it was not the patter of far-off footsteps drawing closer. Where he was _supposed_ to have found his anger, he had no idea. Perhaps he would find it a little later. Perhaps not.

When Elrond finally found it in himself to turn and face Celebrimbor, Celebrimbor’s face was… Actually, it was cast in the same uneasy shadow that it had been all afternoon. Elrond did not know why it was that he’d expected anything otherwise, except that when Celebrimbor had spoken, his tone had seemed almost normal.

“Could you repeat that?” Elrond asked him, cursing inwardly at the slight stutter in his voice, though under the circumstances, he thought that it was unlikely to go remarked upon.

“There were blackberries out past the town,” Celebrimbor repeated, confirming that, yes, Elrond had heard exactly what he had thought he’d heard. “It will be dark before we know it. If you want fresh food with your supper, we should go out and pick some now.” His lips thinned. “We should not be wandering around too much after nightfall. It would be entirely too easy to fall down a shaft into the tunnels.”

Elrond could have remarked upon Celebrimbor’s obvious lack of enthusiasm with the whole idea of being here, could have sniped at him about how of course _he_ would want to take a trip away from the castle, even though they had just gotten here. He did not. He swallowed it down, no matter how it grated upon the inside of his throat. He had already spoken rashly once today. Better not to make a habit of it.

He would like some fresh food with the supper of what could only loosely be called ‘food,’ anyways. Just to hold in his mind the memory of what actual food actually tasted like.

“Were there blackberry bushes here when the fortress was still occupied?” Elrond asked Celebrimbor as they were leaving the castle, having hurried through the entrance hall, the better to avoid breathing in _too_ much of the air in that mold-infested chamber. Elrond would really rather not risk having mold spores sprout from his lungs.

As they left the entrance hall behind them and stepped back out into the unkempt green, Elrond had to pause a moment, blinking unexpectedly strong orange-golden sunlight (he resisted the comparison to topaz, if only barely) out of his eyes. Celebrimbor’s estimations had been correct, and they had spent more time within the castle than Elrond had thought. Long shadows cast by the western wall drenched part of the green in rotting, deathly black; those same shadows stretched greedy fingers towards the path Elrond and Celebrimbor took towards the inner gate, left open without a need to worry about invaders, but they could never quite reach them. What shadows touched the two men as they made their way towards the town, they carried with them.

“Not many,” Celebrimbor replied tersely.

A spike of worry, if yet small and not nearly so keen as it could have been, gnawed and worried at the pit of Elrond’s stomach. Even in such a state as what currently possessed him, Elrond would have thought that Celebrimbor would have jumped at the chance to expound upon the past of one of the places he had lived in the past. Now _here_ was a man who could easily dwell in the past without drowning in it; Elrond would have thought him delighted at such an invitation to swim.

But that was how he had _seemed_ to Elrond, and perhaps there had been another truth lurking behind the surface image.

 _I cannot believe that I am actually trying to encourage him to go digging around in the past_. Elrond tried pushing the sardonic thought from his mind, but quickly gave up on the attempt. What was rooted so firmly in his mind would not be so quickly dislodged from it.

That _was_ what he was doing, though, was it not? Trying to encourage indulgence in what hurt, what Elrond could not imagine _not_ hurting, for even if Celebrimbor did not try to drag him headlong into remembrance, so far under the surface of the water that his bones might well be crushed, he would still be a witness, still have to listen to it, and even if a blow did not catch you squarely, it could still do injury in its glance. Elrond should not be courting that sort of pain.

It would have provided some signal of _normalcy_. If Elrond had to listen to Celebrimbor speak (and speak, and speak, potentially) of the days of his youth picking blackberries on the crest of Himring Hill, if Elrond had to risk being dragged into a conversation about childhood in general and all of its wreckage and sharp-spikes-at-the-bottom pitfalls, at least it would have given Elrond some sense that Celebrimbor was feeling even remotely himself.

This terseness was what he had received, instead. And Elrond would not even _ask_ what it was that was wrong, for Celebrimbor would only adopt his mildest-possible tone to tell him that _nothing_ was wrong, why should _anything_ be wrong, Elrond? It was enough to make Elrond take the matter directly to Celebrimbor’s mind—almost. He had little doubt that Celebrimbor would put up a tremendous fight to keep him out—who would be expected to act otherwise, at such an invasion?—and Elrond had never liked… Well. One rarely found _palatable_ things waiting in the mind of another. That had been Elrond’s experience, anyways.

Elrond shook his head and followed after Celebrimbor, frowning deeply and saying nothing more. He would watch closely for any change, be it a step towards recovery or deterioration. He had much experience of that sort of watching. He had not thought to ever have a need for it again, but it had not been long enough for him to forget. He did not think it would ever be long enough for him to forget.

As they passed through the town, Elrond found that the sense of being watched, of expecting to see someone staring out of the empty and broken windows at him, had not lessened any. His own fault, perhaps—he’d not devoted any time to breaking down that illusory sense, not devoted any time to trying to convince himself that the town was empty and he and Celebrimbor were the only two people on the island. His own fault, perhaps, but slinging blame this way or that would not change the fact that the hairs on the back of Elrond’s neck and arms stood on end the entire time they walked through the town towards the outer gate. The town was a necropolis missing all of its bones. Even if it boasted no graves, it was still not a place for the living. Not anymore.

“How many blackberries are you wanting?” Elrond asked Celebrimbor, once they had finally made their way out to where they had earlier today seen a patch of blackberry bushes growing. The shadows were longer now, the orange-golden sky verging towards a rusty red that Elrond did not want to compare to old blood.

The Sea was out of his sight, here, penned off by the high, crumbling walls; even in the places where the stones had come loose and tumbled down onto the grass, the remains of the wall yet stood too tall to show Elrond water and foam and currents and waves and wrath. But Elrond could hear it. Its song was stronger than ever. It still did not sing for hm.

Celebrimbor shrugged. “More than last time, I think. We’ve been walking around for hours, and much of that uphill.”

Well, that was a little less terse than last time. He’d not asked Elrond in return, but Elrond was less offended by that than he was concerned. Celebrimbor did not sound like a man in the middle of deterioration—the sound of crumbling, weeping decline was a very specific one, and even if all the Ages of the world were to pass Elrond by without his ever hearing it again, it would yet remained branded on the fabric of his mind—but Elrond would have been much happier to hear even a hint of real cheer in his voice, and what he’d gotten was… It was not that.

(Elrond supposed it could have been worse. His ears could well have been assaulted by a _parody_ of cheer. False cheer was never a good sign, in his estimation. False cheer was a sign that deterioration _had_ taken hold, and the speaker was both cognizant of it, and not invested in anyone else finding out, in anyone else trying to _help_ him.

…Come to think of it, he’d heard plenty of false cheer from Celebrimbor over the course of this journey. It was not the sort of false cheer men painted on their faces when they were contemplating the ruin of their lives, and certainly did not wish for any interference. Still, thinking back on those instances when Celebrimbor had painted a lightless smile over his own evident discomfort was not what Elrond would call reassuring.)

At least he was willing to eat. Elrond had watched people in the throes of the ruin of their lives and every thought that piled on to the destruction lose their appetite, and then refuse to even _try_ to search for it, refuse to even try to eat even when it was the only thing that could sustain their bodies another day. Force-feeding had… had not been an option, at the time. Pleading _was_ , and even when Elrond did not know just what to say to spark _some_ motivation within the one he was appealing to, if he groped around for _anything_ to say for long enough, eventually he would hit on something that could get them to eat, even if he never was quite able to figure out just what that something had been. Celebrimbor was willing to eat, without having to be persuaded, pleaded with, or goaded. That was something.

These blackberries were larger and darker than the ones Elrond and Celebrimbor had picked that day in Forlindon. Elrond popped one into his mouth curiously, finding that they _tasted_ riper as well. The deep maroon blackberry he had just eaten was tarter than he would have expected of a ripe blackberry, but there was a sweetness to it that had been lacking in the blackberries he had eaten in the sunny meadow. Elrond licked the juice from his lips, smiling slightly. At least he would have something reasonably palatable to eat alongside what claimed to be his supper.

They passed the time spent picking blackberries to fill the small sack Celebrimbor had dug out of his pack in silence. Elrond watched surreptitiously out of the corner of his eye, noticing that Celebrimbor’s hands did not shake in this task as they had when he had opened the gates. Perhaps that was due to the task. Perhaps he was hungry, and was looking forward to eating what he had picked. Perhaps it was because they were no longer within the castle. Elrond could not guess. He could not have asked. Celebrimbor would not have given him any true answer.

Eventually, though, the task was done, and they must turn back around towards the town. As they walked in yet more silence, Elrond wondered where it was they would sleep tonight. Somewhere within the confines of the castle, he supposed, but where?

Not the entrance hall. He doubted Celebrimbor would make the suggestion, and even if he did, Elrond wouldn’t have accepted it if it was the last room on earth, not if the alternative was dying a slow, painful death. The death inflicted on him by a hundred thousand _million_ mold spores blooming within his own body would undoubtedly be so much more painful than any other death he could have found for himself here. No need to tempt fate.

The salon they had gone through was a possibility, Elrond supposed. The wind could find it, but it was more sheltered from the wind than the entrance hall would have been, and _certainly_ more sheltered than if they had chosen to sleep outside. They would have to sleep on the floor—Elrond wasn’t looking to test the strength of rotting wood and cloth and stuffing, not for hours at a time—but it wasn’t as if the salon stank of mold the way the entrance hall did. It was a possibility.

There were no doubt personal quarters somewhere in the castle, places that might even still have the rotting remains of what had once been luxurious beds. Elrond did not think he would be sleeping there. Even if those places were completely sheltered from the wind, even if they were dry and free of mold, even if by some miracle the beds were completely intact and fit to sleep in, Elrond did not think he would have chosen to sleep there. He’d had his fill of sleeping in the beds of the dead. He had been a child who hadn’t known any better, a child who would rather sleep on any bed than no bed at all, when last he had done such. He was not a child anymore. He could stand sleeping three nights on the ground, if that was what it took. He had already been sleeping on the ground for nights on end just to reach the port. Three more would not be so bad as all that.

Halfway to the outer gate, Celebrimbor peered west suddenly, frowning deeply. “That’s strange,” he muttered.

“What?” Elrond asked in turn, unsure of whether or not to be reassured by this sudden display of… well, of Celebrimbor actually taking notice of what was going on around him.

Celebrimbor nodded west, his frown deepening further, carving deep lines into his face. “Anor sinks more quickly than I would have thought. And I may be no seaman, but I think those clouds have come up more quickly than is customary.”

Westward, Anor was foundering in a sea of black clouds that had come swiftly from over the horizon, its fires half-quenched in the smoky depths of vapor. They’d have a storm tonight, if the clouds kept on pushing east towards them, but for now, a few rays of sunlight yet shot upwards towards the roof of the sky, and they were made all the brighter for the backdrop of black against which they shone.

Frowning slightly, Elrond hazarded a shrug. “The clouds came quickly, but such is the same with many storm clouds traveling across the Sea; I’ve seen others travel more quickly, in my time.” The wrath of Ulmo and his Maiar was bad enough on its own. When Aran Einior felt the need to add his voice to the furor, the situation typically devolved from a resting position of ‘dangerous’ to ‘absolutely _perfect_ if your greatest wish is to disappear without a trace, without leaving behind even a body that your loved ones could have buried.’ “And as for Anor, I do not think it is sinking any more quickly than usual.”

At least, Elrond certainly hoped it was not. He could not tell just by looking how quickly Anor was rising towards or sinking away from its zenith; he did not have the sort of mind required to constantly be tracking speed and motion. Even if he did, he thought that those angry black clouds—Elrond wished they were not as thoroughly surrounded as they were by booming waves; it would have been much easier to listen for distant thunder from the mainland—would have thrown him off.

What would it be like for the world, if Anor suddenly began sinking more quickly than usual? Elrond could guess perhaps at longer winters and colder autumns, at springs and summers that passed by all too quickly. He could guess at deeper frosts and the deaths of all of the southern plants in the capital that had been painstakingly nurtured outside the shelter of the greenhouses. Elrond thought he could do without the changes, honestly. He had had enough upheaval to last for an eternity.

With that in mind, Elrond told himself firmly that no, Anor was not sinking any more quickly towards the Uttermost West than it ever did. The idea was a fancy born in Celebrimbor’s mind, a distortion of the world brought about by a shadow on the mind. Elrond had experienced plenty of those, in his time; he knew how to recognize it in others.

Anor might not have been sinking towards the horizon any more quickly than usual, but as Elrond and Celebrimbor made their way back towards the town, the clouds just kept coming out of the west, black as coal and pregnant with rain, thunder booming so loudly that there could no longer be any question of just what it was that Elrond was hearing. The storm was coming upon them with great and terrible haste, and the clouds were swallowing Anor in their furious hunger.

A gust of blisteringly hot wind pummeled Elrond’s side, slamming against him with such force that he stumbled, cursing. The wind howled in his ears—the wind had a song all its own, but it was not the distant, toothlessly enticing song of the Sea; it was all the fury and desolation of the world distilled into a chorus of tireless voices that sought to make the world naught but a reflection of its own wretched rage. He had known this song, too. He never welcomed it when it came.

The wind was furious, and in its fury it screamed with such a deafening voice that Elrond could hear naught else. He could only reach out to Celebrimbor, struggling alongside him, and pray that Celebrimbor would at least be able to parse the memory of his words from reading his lips—Elrond could not hear _himself_ speak; how could he expected Celebrimbor to?—as he asked desperately, “Is there no shelter before the town?”

Whether or not Celebrimbor understood exactly what Elrond had said, he seemed to have at least gotten the gist. Face strained, brow furrowed, he shook his head, pointing towards the outer gate.

Elrond really should not have expected any better. Taking shelter under a tree would have done them no good. If the tree did not blow away in the gale, they most likely would; Elrond was not counting on the weight of his pack to keep him bound to the earth. Elrond had no desire to be carried off by the wind, not today. That could only end with his body smashed against rock or drowned in deep water, a fate that Elrond thought he might consider even more unappealing than dying with a body infested with mold spores. It was reaching the town—reaching the _castle_ , really; the houses might be behind the shelter of high walls, but they were flimsy compared to the castle and even _now_ , Elrond did not want to go into any of them…

Another powerful gust of wind assailed them, trying to drag them off of their path. Eyes bright with panic— _here_ was something that could drag Celebrimbor out of his near-stupor—Celebrimbor grabbed Elrond’s arm, fingers tight as he pulled him towards him. Elrond could guess at what he was after; Celebrimbor’s grip slackened momentarily, and Elrond took the opportunity to shake off his hand and slip his arm through Celebrimbor’s. There. If they were blown off the island, they’d be blown off together, but at least it would be a little harder for the wind to manage it, now.

Elrond pressed close to Celebrimbor’s side, and grit his teeth against the wind as they made the final push towards the town. He’d not thought it even possible, but it sounded as if the wind had gotten even louder in these past several moments. He couldn’t have heard himself speak if he tried. Actually, _forget_ speaking; he was having a hard time hearing himself _think_. The wind battered against him with such force that he felt as if someone was catapulting rocks onto his body. The gusts that howled in his ears now howled with such intensity that he could feel his ears popping, sending sparks of pain shooting down the sides of his face and neck.

Meanwhile, the sky was growing ever darker and darker. Anor was entirely hidden, now, behind a curtain of black clouds so thick that no light could ever have hoped to pierce them. The clouds were edged with a dull, bloody red (Elrond could no longer resist that particular comparison) tint, the only traces left of what had once been brilliant sunlight. The skies in the east were not the indigo of night, the stars yet invisible, but the pretty hues of sunset that could have been present were invisible as well. Instead, the eastern sky looked considerably more like a mud puddle reflecting the light at sunset, than the sky at sunset itself. There were traces of red and golden and orange, but all of it was underlaid with a pale, muddy brown that denied it any beauty it might otherwise have possessed. The day was going to go down the way a soldier went down in battle. No glory to be found here, no matter what the poems or the songs might have claimed. Just defeat, and darkness.

At last, they reached the town, the pair of them ducking into the lee of a nearby building together, just to try and get a break from the wind. Celebrimbor tipped his head back against the stone, squeezing his eyes shut, while Elrond stared in exhaustion at the wall opposite them, at crumbling stone and empty windows, catching his breath. The wind was a little quieter here; the walls surrounding the town gave them some small amount of relief, and the wall they were leaning against gave them a little more. The wind was a little quieter here, but Elrond barely marked it, for his heart was pounding, blood rushing in his ears and drowning out whatever noise the wind might have let through. Even if the wind battering against him had been hot and humid, his ears were still popping and smarting as if he had been assaulted by the worst of the winter winds. His face stung as well, skin chafed by the merciless beating the salt-laden winds had inflicted upon him.

 _I will sleep well tonight, until the dreams come for me,_ he thought wryly, _but when I wake, I will no doubt feel as if someone was playing on my bones with a hammer. All the night long, even._

Night would fall, and soon. It would be easier if Elrond had been able to mark the moment when night was truly upon them, but he had a feeling that it was going to sneak up on him unawares, this time. It was quickly growing so dark that it could well have been night, already. The clouds had raced towards them so quickly that even now, they swirled and roiled overhead, each gust bringing the scent of rain to Elrond’s nostrils. Thunder cracked nearly directly overhead, ear-splitting in the threats it made of lightning, though there was no lightning to be seen.

Just as well that there was no lightning, though Elrond did note its lack, the stirrings of wrongness sounding faintly in the back of his mind. If lightning struck anywhere on the island, all he could do was hope that, by that point, the rain was falling thick enough to put out any fires the strike lit. While they did have an escape route, and there were doubtless many more elsewhere on the island that Celebrimbor could have gotten them to before the flames reached them, Elrond _really_ didn’t want to spend the rest of the time until the ship returned for them in the cave they had eaten in earlier. The close quarters, with nowhere else to go but into the dark where Elrond wouldn’t dare go by himself, for fear of falling to his death, would soon prove awkward. He’d just as well not deal with fire, tonight. Even once the rains came, it would be warm enough that they wouldn’t need one during the night.

Elrond… He was not to the point where he was looking forward to a supper of travel rations, not yet. He didn’t think he could get to that point, not even if he was starving. _Maybe_ he’d get to the point of looking forward to travel rations if he was on the point of death, but Elrond thought it was more likely that he’d be wanting travel rations when he was dead and sitting in the Timeless Halls, and _any_ food, even an impostor only claiming to be food, would be better than the sheer boredom of sitting in the Houses of the Dead for countless years with no food at all.

Elrond would have to be out of his _mind_ to be looking forward to travel rations while he yet drew breath, but at this point, he was close. The normalcy of sitting down for a meal, even if it was a meal of what only claimed to be food, would be a balm on his mind after the way it had become so unsettled during his exploration of the castle. And if he went too long without food, he came down with nasty headaches, and he hadn’t brought any of the headache remedies he normally took. He’d sooner avoid the headache altogether.

The first fat drop of water struck his face, and Elrond bit back a sigh. He was glad of the materials his pack was made of. They might not be able to keep out water as well as a sealed stone container could have done, but the exterior of the pack had been well-oiled and he kept his parchment well-wrapped within the pack itself. The rest of him… Well, his clothes weren’t going to keep out water nearly so well as that.

Under other circumstances, Elrond thought he might have welcomed getting just a _bit_ wet. He wasn’t going to have access to a bathtub until they returned to the port, and the waters below were not the sort he would have hazarded a swim in, even if getting to them didn’t involve a long (long, _long_ ) walk through the bowels of the hill. Elrond did not particularly care to go too long without bathing; if he hadn’t needed this assignment so badly to help build up a new reputation for himself, he thought the lack of access to anything he would have needed to bathe himself might have given him pause.

But considering the present circumstances, it would be better just to get back within the confines of the castle grounds before the rain got to be too bad. It was only getting darker with each passing moment, and the path from the town gates to the castle gates hadn’t exactly been _straight_. Imagine if they got lost. It would be absolutely laughable—well, it would have been laughable if they weren’t stuck out in the middle of a thunderstorm on the middle of an isolated island in the middle of the Sea. No, they needed to get back to the castle. There would surely be somewhere they could go that was sheltered from the wind and the rain, somewhere they could eat and sleep in the dry.

A pale light flared in the rainy gloom.

Celebrimbor was craning his head, leaning close to say something in Elrond’s ear. Elrond did not hear him, barely registered and could find no reaction when he felt strands of wet hair brush against the side of his chafed face.

He was staring into one of the windows set into the opposite wall. And through that window, something was staring back at him.

Soon enough, Celebrimbor, his fingers digging painfully into Elrond’s arm, was staring as well.

They had been standing in the gloom of almost-night, inflicted by coal-black storm clouds so dense and so angry that they shut out any of the light that could have diluted their influence. There had been no lights burning in the windows, no lanterns burning from the crumbling remains of the stone posts; there weren’t even any lanterns _left_ to hang from those rusting hooks that yet remained mounted in the posts. The only light that should ever have shone in the town these days was sunlight, or moonlight, or starlight.

But there was light here. Elrond’s heart shot up into his throat as he looked all around him, his eyes catching on point of light after point of light. There were pale, colorless lights bobbing all around them, lights that lit up nothing of what surrounded them, lights that lit up only themselves. And out of those lights shone staring eyes, and silent mouths.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Aran Einior** —Manwë
> 
>  **Anor** —the Sindarin name for the Sun


	13. Chapter Thirteen

For a long moment, Elrond could say nothing. He was hardly alone in this—the storm raging down upon them might have deafened all speech that was not murmured directly into the ear, but Elrond’s eyes were still working. His _mind_ might be malfunctioning, but there was absolutely nothing wrong with his eyesight. He was confronted with a multitude of staring, piercing eyes, and a multitude of shut and silent mouths.

His mind… In focusing on the lack of speech, his mind might have been stalling. This wasn’t… He hadn’t expected…

It wasn’t as if he had never _heard_ of this. Elrond would have had to have gone through his life without reading a single, solitary book to have never heard of it. (And considering his present occupation, that would have been no small feat. Elrond was _proud_ of his memory, at least in the times when it wasn’t one of his greatest banes. He rarely needed to be told something twice in order to remember it properly. But he did not think he had the sort of memory that could have allowed him to hold in his memory every last thing a loremaster needed to know in order to go about their work properly without ever consulting a book, or a scroll, or occasionally the scraps of parchment you found shoved in between desk drawers by someone either exceptionally busy or exceptionally committed to keeping _this_ tidbit a secret. He would not tempt fate and risk some sort of injury that would have permanently damaged his memory by claiming that, oh, he did not _need_ notes. Fate did not appreciate tempting; Elrond suspected it was under the domain of the Doomsman.) And even if Elrond had managed to go through life without the education expected either for a Sindarin prince—albeit one in severely reduced circumstances compared to his predecessors to that title—or the ward of a pair of Ñoldorin princes—also severely reduced, compared to the past—he had hardly gone through life with his ears closed.

Beleriand as he had known it had been a land of death. Gone were the gentle times when farmers’ fields could grow untroubled and shepherds could migrate their flocks without having to worry unduly over wolves and bears or at all regarding Orcs. A green land Beleriand might yet have been in those days, in the lands south of the deserted borders of ruined Doriath—even the memory of Melian’s power was strong enough to make the foul things that poured out of the northern hills think twice of foraying into the empty forests, at least not without a _strong_ inducement—but it was the green of abandoned, fallow desolation. It was the green of a land that had long since ceased to boast the numbers of Edhil or good, faithful Men who could have tamed the wildness into somewhere parents were unafraid to allow their children to stray out of their sight.

Death was a truer ruler over Beleriand than even Morgoth, in those days. _Morgoth_ kept to his fastness in Angband, never straying from it until the Rodyn finally forced his hand. He never led his armies or raiding parties when they came down from the North to harry those survivors clinging to their secret places—not _safe_ , you understand, _safety_ was a dream beyond the reach of any clutching hands. Not even the prospect of Gondolin’s destruction, not even the offer of facing Turgon, long-hated and longer-feared, and crushing him underfoot as Morgoth had done to his father, could persuade Morgoth to leave Angband behind him.

_Death_ , on the other hand, went wherever it wished to, and took whatever spoils it liked from the homes of those it visited. Death could not be gainsaid. Death could not be cowed into retreating into a strong place and barring the doors. Death took what it wanted, and what it wanted was every last thing under Anor which drew breath. You knew its kingship by the fact that when Death came for you at last, there was no sign or password or desperate plea that could keep it from shoving you headlong off of the mortal coil.

So many had died. By the end, many of them had not even died by the sword. More starved, more drowned, more were crushed within the greedy and merciless embrace of earth that had had more than enough of people actually living on and off of it. This had been starting even before Elrond was born, though he was to understand that in those days, the rumbles were confined to the furthest reaches of the north. Certainly, he’d never felt the sandy and watery earth tremble beneath his feet when he yet dwelled in the Lisgardh; no matter how young Elrond had been when he left it behind him, he thought he would have remembered that.

So many had died. The Calaquendi preached that all spirits, finding themselves forcibly separated from their now-cooling bodies, should heed the call of the Doomsman, however much the Exiles might have feared him and, in some cases, outright reviled him, and come to the doors of his Timeless Halls, so that they might face the judgment of their earthly deeds and dwell in the Houses of the Dead for as long as he saw fit, until new bodies were made for them and they would dwell forevermore in the lands of bliss, safe and hidden Valinor (Well, however blissful a land full of Edhil who had done murder and the Edhil who had been murdered by them could ever _be_ ; perhaps the Rodyn made them all dwell in separate domains?).

This was what the Calaquendi said, anyways. Elrond was _not_ a Calaquendë, himself. Though he and his people would readily agree that there was much value to be gained from the knowledge of the Calaquendi, none of them would ever concede that the Calaquendi’s was the only knowledge that could have any value at all. None of them would ever concede that the Calaquendi were always, invariably _right_.

Truth be told, the prevailing opinion among the Iathrim, at least the one who had surrounded Elrond in the Lisgardh, and at least by the time Elrond was born and they’d had some time to absorb some of the ideas of the Gondolindrim whom circumstances had forced them to accept into their lives, was that the recently deceased should heed the call of the Doomsman and go to his dwellings in the furthest reaches of the Uttermost West. Piety did not enter into it, or, at least, piety did not enter into it enough for most of them to bring it up as a reason. The greater concern among the Iathrim was the fact that the houseless spirits of those dead Edhil who had refused the summons seemed to… _deteriorate_ , at least after a while, at least in those for whom the fire of their spirits had never burned particularly brightly even in life.

Many of the Iathrim, especially those who had been born long after the initial summons from the Rodyn for the Edhil to journey to Valinor and _stay there_ , did not particularly want to go to Valinor, themselves. They had not been overawed by the glory of Araw when he came to try to cajole the Edhil to leave the place where they had first awoken under the stars; they had never met Araw for Araw to even try to overawe them. They had not seen Thingol before he drank in the light of the Trees, before he was transformed into something so close to them, and yet altered, brighter, the fire of his spirit a little closer to the surface without consuming his body in the process. They had not seen him before and after his first journey to Valinor—personally, Elrond had little doubt that Thingol had carried his spirit all the way to the Timeless Halls directly after his death; many songs had been sung of the love between Elu Thingol and Melian the Queen, and Thingol would have needed to be very, _very_ dim not to recognize that there was only one place Melian was likely to go after his death, considering that their one and only child had chosen to sever her spirit’s connection to the physical world, and her soul would flee beyond the circles of the world upon her own, now inevitable, death. They had not seen the difference basking in the light of the Trees made in Thingol, and thus, the differences that set him apart from them were considered natural and unremarkable. Very few people connected it to his previous trip to Valinor, and of the ones who did, only a vanishingly small amount took away from that information that Valinor would be a particularly desirable destination while they still had a choice about it. Until they died, or until the song the Sea put in their hearts grew so unbearably loud that they’d get on that ship just to make it _shut up_ , they would be staying right here.

The vast majority of the Iathrim were perfectly content to spend the entirety of their long (hopefully _very_ long, though even in what was _supposed_ to be a peaceful Age under the light of Anor, who knew what could happen?) lives in Ennor, never seriously contemplating getting onto one of the ships unless there was just no other choice but to live on these shores in hopeless, furious agony. But after death, oh, after death, the fear of sinking into the earth and becoming nothing ran strong in the Iathrim. They who had once built up such a great and glorious kingdom—not great or glorious enough to consistently protect anything that laid outside of its own borders, perhaps, but still great and glorious, to hear everyone who had lived within the borders of Melian’s protection speak of it—within these lands did not want to go to a place where everyone who was anyone agreed, _loudly_ , that the Iathrim’s lives in Ennor had been benighted and mistaken, and any attempt to build anything great and glorious was both folly, and had never even succeeded in the first place. They did not wish for this, but the prospect of becoming nothing, of consciousness utterly and irrevocably snuffed out, could make nearly anyone turn to alternatives they had never before wanted or wished for.

(Sometimes, Elrond wondered what the Laegrim and the Avari thought of it. He could well _guess_ what the Avari thought of it. The Avari, Elrond imagined, would likely think it preferable to take their chances with the total cessation of consciousness, rather than go to a place they had never, ever, _ever_ even _contemplated_ wanting to go. Considering how low a regard most of the Calaquendi, and honestly, even most of the Iathrim and Falathrim held the Avari in, Elrond could not rightly say he blamed them.

The Laegrim were a mystery to him. That was only natural, Elrond supposed. Even when Maedhros and Maglor had had dealings with those few Laegrim who were yet willing to associate with them when he and Elros were children under their care, Elrond and Elros had interacted with those Laegrim but little, if they interacted with them at all. By those days, the Laegrim were far more inclined to keep to themselves than to socialize, even among those who were at least nominally their allies. Elrond had no idea what they thought of death. He had no idea what they thought of what happened to their spirits after death.)

These were… These were…

It was… foolish, to try to guess at who they had been, when they were alive. Exiles or Calaquendi who had come to fight in the War of Wrath and had died far from home (though Elrond sincerely doubted that that latter quality of Calaquendi would have _ever_ denied the call of the Doomsman, if they ever heard that call at all), Iathrim or Mithrim or Laegrim or Gondolindrim or even Avari, Elrond could not say. There were no features that could have distinguished them from one another. He looked all around him, and he saw pale, bobbing lights, deathly and watery, incapable of lighting up anything but themselves, with staring eyes and silent mouths, and the mortification of their bodies had obliterated anything that might have marked them out from each other. They were just… spirits.

Spirits, if Elrond’s mind was not playing tricks on him, and his judgment was not wrong and his eyes were not deceiving him. A sideways glance at Celebrimbor’s taut face, all bright, staring eyes and rigid jaw, at least told him that he was not alone in seeing the spirits that clustered around them. Shared hallucinations being decidedly uncommon, and Elrond sensing not even the slightest whisper of magic that could have forced a false vision upon them both, what was more likely was that his mind was not playing tricks on him. More likely was that his initial assumption had been correct, and he saw right.

Spirits. Houseless spirits. Ghosts, as Men called them, and as Elrond sometimes called them, himself.

Well, Beleriand had been a land of the dead. Why should its remains be any different?

_No reason. There is no reason whatsoever why it should be any different._ Elrond swallowed hard as he stared around him. His heart was now throbbing so hard that he felt as though it might burst if tried to move too quickly, if he tried to speak, if he tried even to breathe too hard. He could not say if the lump in his throat, hard and hot and thick, was born from sadness or fear. There had been stories of things such as this in the Lisgardh, you know. Stories that were the reason he and Elros were never allowed out of the sight of any and all who were around them, the reason why they were not allowed outside at night.

For a moment, forget stories—Elrond had _seen_ the pale lights shining out in the reeds at night, had watched them dance and bob and weave their way through the reeds out in the distance, just far away that Elrond was unable to discern if the light came from someone walking out in the reeds, holding a lamp, or if the light came from another source entirely. For a moment, forget stories, but once the moment passed, let memory of the stories return to you, and let them whisper to you of strange lights in the reeds, though there might be but one settlement living in hiding in the Lisgardh. There were always whispers of disappearances, of the unwary or the too-curious or the perhaps-enchanted following the lights out into the reeds, and never again returning to the camp alive. No one knew quite what it was that had become of those unlucky wanderers. There were plenty of whispers of soaked and bloated corpses, of one more light appearing in the reeds after every report of a disappearance.

Elrond could not… He could not imagine what it was like, to be a spirit with no flesh containing him. He could not imagine what it was like to be untethered thus in the Houses of the Dead, let alone outside of them, where his spirit would have been prey to every strong and malicious will seeking to subordinate _his_ will to theirs.

He stared around, heart skipping beats so often now that he was beginning to feel light-hearted, trying and failing not to meet the eyes upon eyes that stared back at him. Elrond had not been able to imagine what it was to be spirit without flesh, to be unable ever to return to flesh, to be incapable of being fully part of the world in which he dwelled. He was imagining it, now.

It brought him little joy.

Celebrimbor leaned close over his ear, and this time, when he spoke, Elrond had no trouble making out the words. In a voice as if there were hands wrapped tight around his throat, “The castle. Now.”

Elrond spared a look at Celebrimbor’s face, if only for a moment. Celebrimbor was not looking back at him, his gaze yet locked on the spirits gathered round, drawing ever closer. His face was still taut, jaw still rigid, but his lips had begun to wobble, and his eyes had developed a misty sheen that Elrond thought had little to do with the driving rain gluing their hair and clothes to their skin.

Truthfully, Elrond did not need the direction, though his frozen legs might appreciate the jolt. Beleriand had been a land of the dead. Elrond was not dead, and he had no desire to dwell among them.

(Would not the castle be worse?)

So they stepped away from the wall, where their meager shelter was cut short by the company of the dead. Barely conscious of having separated in the first place, Elrond slid his arm back through the crook of Celebrimbor’s elbow (Celebrimbor jumped, but once his darting eyes settled on Elrond’s arm, he seemed disinclined to separate again). They were more sheltered from the wind, here—though it yet battered against them, any threats it might make of carrying one or both of them off of the ground and into the Sea had been rendered toothless the moment they passed through the outer gates. There was no need for it, but…

Elrond shook the thoughts out of his mind. Whatever comfort he might derive from it, considering the way Celebrimbor’s arm trembled as they walked, he had a feeling that he was not the one who profited most from the gesture he had made. Finding it impossible to avoid looking into staring eyes when he looked straight ahead, Elrond focused his gaze upon the muddy ground and set his jaw, trying to ward off the quiver that had lately wormed down into bone. He did not wish to live side-by-side with the dead.

The dead did not part as they passed, weaving a circuitous, cringing path through them, but neither did they make any effort to outright hinder their progress towards the castle gates. They were silent. Elrond could only presume that they yet stared. They made no pleas, no entreaties, no offers, no threats. They were simply there, existing, flesh long since rotted to nothing, and if they felt the grief of no longer being able to be truly part of the world that Elrond would have expected to feel in himself, they gave no sign.

Perhaps they were incapable. Perhaps the process of slowly sinking into the earth and becoming nothing stripped all feeling from the spirit. For one, Elrond was not curious. The dead could give him no knowledge—at least, none that he cared ever to bear as a burden on his shoulders.

They had made no attempt to hinder Elrond or Celebrimbor as they passed, but eventually, Elrond became aware that the dead were following them down their winding path of side-streets and alleys. Gritting his teeth, he lifted his head and looked behind him, and sure enough, those bobbing lights that had once been Edhil were trailing after them, pouring out of every nook and cranny that had ever been opened here by wind and rain and age. They were not following with great speed; they were not following with any apparent urgency. But they were following them, and Elrond had never known anything on the face of this earth to follow another living being without any aim at all. Even an animal, if it decided to follow an Edhel it did not know particularly well, likely thought that that Edhel was either going to give it food, or lead it to a source of food. If these ghosts were following them now, there was a purpose behind it.

Oh, yes, there was a purpose behind it. Elrond did not want particularly to find out what that purpose was.

“Just keep walking,” Celebrimbor muttered as they ducked into a particularly narrow alleyway, perhaps sensing Elrond’s thoughts, though given that Elrond had stiffened considerably when he realized that the ghosts were following them, perhaps he’d not needed any to make any such effort. “Don’t stop; just keep—“

Of course, Celebrimbor chose that very moment to stop dead in his tracks.

“What happened to ‘just keep walking?’” Elrond hissed at him, scowling fiercely. Between the storm, the growing dark, and the fact that they were surrounded by the houseless spirits of their _dead_ , Elrond hadn’t needed to be _told_ to keep walking. He would readily have broken into a run if he hadn’t been worried the wind would take his increased velocity as an invitation to slam him into a wall, if he’d not been concerned that the dead might take it as provocation, if he hadn’t been concerned about potentially leaving Celebrimbor alone in this mob of ghosts, and if he hadn’t been concerned about the serious possibility that, if he ran through this maze of streets and side-street and alleys in the dark, without Celebrimbor on hand to guide him, he would just get hopelessly lost and potentially have to spend the night out here, which considering the fact that this was just about the _last_ place on the island where Elrond wanted to spend the night, killed stone dead any thought Elrond might have had of leaving Celebrimbor’s side and running.

All that, and now, Celebrimbor had just _stopped._ What, was he going to look to Elrond and tell him he’d left one of his spurs in the patch of blackberry bushes they’d come from? Was he going to say that he had let one of the locals borrow one of his books during his last stay in Himring, and that he wanted to take a look inside of their house to see if the book was still there and in any recoverable condition?

Celebrimbor… wasn’t saying anything, actually. Elrond shook his arm, his scowl lightening slightly. “Celebrimbor, why aren’t you moving?”

And still, no answer. Elrond shook his arm free of Celebrimbor’s and came to stand before him, scowl shifting fully into a concerned frown. “Celebrimbor?”

Celebrimbor’s face was… The best word for it was that his face was frozen. He was staring straight ahead, and his eyes were darting all over, but the rest of his face was totally motionless. It was as if someone had caught his image in unfeeling, unmoving stone, so lifelike that even those who had seen his face enough times to know immediately the difference between Celebrimbor and something claiming to be Celebrimbor would have been given pause, would have had to stop and _look_ for a long moment before they realized that this was the statue, and not the man.

Elrond had seen Celebrimbor in stillness. This was something else. He _was_ given pause, but not because he was trying to look for something that would prove what he looked upon to be a man, and not stone cunningly carved and painted. He was given pause because he could see the emotion shining desperately bright in Celebrimbor’s eyes. What it was, he was less certain of. But Elrond had enough of an idea to tear his eyes away from Celebrimbor’s face and look elsewhere. Soon, almost immediately, really, he saw what must surely be the source.

Elrond had forgotten his anger with Celebrimbor for stopping in his tracks when they should have been moving, could probably have stood to be running. His anger was now directed at something else entirely.

It seemed that the ghosts could do something other than stare at them and follow after them when they tried to move away from them, after all. The ghosts, it seemed, could touch them.

Celebrimbor had stopped dead in his tracks, so still and so silent that Elrond could barely even tell that he still breathed. One of the ghosts, as void of distinguishing features as all of the others, a ghost whom Elrond could never have hoped to identify, though considering the sheer number of people who had died in Beleriand, it was unlikely he would have been unable to identify them even if their distinguishing features were intact, and _this_ was getting away from the point.

The point was, one of the ghosts had floated up to Celebrimbor and set their ghostly hand upon his arm. And presumably the very moment the ghost had set their hand upon Celebrimbor’s arm, he had just… stopped. He’d not cried out, not doubled over, not given any sign that Elrond could have taken to signal that he was in pain. He had just stopped dead in his tracks, and never started moving again.

Honestly, the silence was as alarming as crying out or doubling over would have been.

Elrond did not dare touch the translucent, shining substance that made up the ghost with his bare hands. He could only guess at what would become of him in that case; the worst case scenario was that he would wind up in the same state as Celebrimbor, and that they would just remain perfectly still in the driving rain until either the ghost deigned to move away from them, or until by some cause or another they were to die, and become spirits themselves (Though Elrond suspected that in both of their cases, they would not be spirits who dwelled in the desolate town clinging to the walls of Himring Castle). Elrond was a curious man; he would own that. He was a curious man, and he would not shy away from experimentation when it presented itself to him in such a neat and inviting fashion—under most circumstances. Under _these_ circumstances, he would rather cut off the problem at the exterior source presented to him, than let it carry on for long enough to see exactly what its symptoms were and from where it ultimately derived.

Celebrimbor was his _guide_. He was not a test subject, and Elrond was hardly going to let an impromptu experiment play out before his eyes. _Especially_ not considering they were getting absolutely drenched.

That in mind, Elrond drew his dagger from his belt. The moment he held it in his hands, he felt like a child, like a foolish child who thought that he could influence a world that had absolutely no care for him and his thoughts on what the world should be, a foolish child who thought he could influence an uncaring world when all he was armed with were his thoughts and his feelings and, back then, he’d not even had a knife—he’d just had his dreams, dreams that seemed to lead him in circles and circles, spiraling down a path that invariably led him to a faceless father and a mother who shone with a light so pure and so overpowering that turned aught it touched to dross. He felt like a child, but the feeling gifted him with a memory that kept his grip firm upon the hilt of the dagger.

Namely, Elrond remembered that when he was a child, he had had little conception of just how dizzyingly unlikely it was that he with his meager power would ever be able to move the unfeeling, uncaring world. He had kept on anyways. He would keep on, now.

“Stop that!” Elrond snapped, slashing at the glimmering arm of the ghost with the blade of his dagger.

Honestly, he wasn’t even certain what it was he had expected to happen. Certainly, Elrond had not expected that it would feel as it did when he slashed the flesh of a living person with his dagger. Much as he despised combat, much as he despised battle and killing, he had cut people with this dagger before—he had _killed_ people with this dagger, many times before. Elrond remembered what it felt like, to cut living flesh with the blade of his dagger. He was unlikely ever to forget.

Elrond was not certain what it was that he had expected to happen, when he slashed the ghostly arm of the apparition who had stopped Celebrimbor in his tracks. As such, he had not expected it when the blade of his dagger went clean through the arm of the ghost, causing its hand and forearm to suddenly evaporate and Celebrimbor to begin to gasp and splutter, an odd choking noise like he had swallowed a mouthful of dirt escaping his quivering lips as he bent double, hands braced on his thighs to keep him from falling over. Elrond had not expected it when a shock of icy cold more appropriate for the deepest nights of winter than a stormy summer’s evening shot up the blade of the dagger and into his arm, a cold so deathly that the moment it touched him, he could no longer feel his hand, and it was all he could do to keep his grip on the dagger.

The ghost did not respond the way you would expect someone who had just had their forearm to respond, but then, considering that they were _dead_ , that was about the only thing happening that could reasonably have been _expected_ to occur. Rather than screaming in pain or dropping to the ground and writhing upon it, the ghost… The ghost _did_ react. Elrond would hold on to that knowledge later, when he needed something to latch onto, something that made him feel less helpless than it seemed that he was. Houseless spirits might be unable ever to be fully part of the world once more, but they were still part of the world in some sense, and they could be affected by other inhabitants of the world they all shared.

The ghost did react. It drew back from Celebrimbor and from Elrond, half-sinking into a nearby wall, drawing its arm back into itself so that it was completely invisible, and the ghost appeared more than ever like the sickly light of a corpse candle. It had not screamed or dropped to the ground in agony in the moment, and it did not hiss or wail or growl or shriek now. Elrond could not imagine such a thing in himself, honestly, not unless his entire body grew as numb as his right hand and forearm were now, but though the ghost seemed to register what had become of its arm, it seemed to trouble it not at all. Perhaps ghosts were like certain species of lizards, those that could regrow their tails after they had been ripped off, and a houseless spirit could manifest body parts at will. Perhaps something that had lost its body long ago and was staring down an eternity of becoming nothing was beyond caring about such trivialities as having part of one its ghostly limbs severed from its… its fire, Elrond supposed. Its deathly cold fire.

Whatever. So long as the ghost that had grabbed Celebrimbor was yet unwilling to latch back on, and the others that had been following them were not swarming them in revenge for the injury Elrond had done to their comrade, they might as well take the opening created and leave this dingy little alley far behind them.

“Celebrimbor?” Elrond tried to sheath his dagger and was instead reduced to cursing as it slipped out of his numb and clumsy hand, its clatter against the cracked and crumbling bricks deafened completely by a particularly tremendous crack of thunder directly overhead. After he retrieved his dagger and finally managed to put it back in its sheath, he pressed his left hand against Celebrimbor’s trembling back, patting it awkwardly. “Celebrimbor, we need to _go_.”

Celebrimbor did not answer him for several long moments, gagging and spluttering, still sounding as if he had swallowed not just a mouthful but a _shovelful_ of dirt. When at last he stopped coughing and straightened back up to his full height, he sucked in a few deep, shuddering breaths, before at last he wiped the back of his hand against his mouth and nodded choppily. “I…” He paused once more, his ragged breathing sounding for all the world as if he had just run for miles. “Yes.” He grit his teeth, eyes shining so bright now with unshed tears that Elrond was more surprised when he blinked those tears away without letting any of them fall. “Yes, _let’s_.”

After all of that, the remainder of the trip to the castle gates was shockingly and blessedly short. Elrond’s hand was so numb that he could not feel the rain falling against it. His gaze kept returning at it, checking for any sign of discoloration, but though the flesh was pale, it was not any paler than he would have expected after his skin had been soaked with water for as long as his exposed skin had been. His right hand was no paler than his left. Unless something changed, he would simply have to choose not to be unduly worried over it. If something turned out to be wrong, there was very little Elrond could do about it _here_ , with the limited supplies he had brought with him.

(He was going to worry about it, anyways. He knew that he was. Elrond knew that until the feeling returned to his hand, he was going to fret about it every spare moment he had. He knew himself, even if there were times when he wished he didn’t. No matter how powerless he was to do anything about it, Elrond would worry. The fact that he was powerless would only serve to make him worry more.)

The castle gate, they had left open when they first went out for the blackberries, and this Elrond registered upon coming within sight of it, mouth twisting with a sick, writhing worry. If the dead congregated so thickly out in the town itself, what was the castle to be like? What spirits haunted the halls and towers and dungeons of Himring Castle? And once Elrond and Celebrimbor passed through the gate, once they slipped through to what would have been ample shelter from literally any other threat, how were they to find rest when those spirits who had first appeared in the town just followed after them into the keep?

Elrond had not wanted to spend his days and nights in the cave. He’d not wanted that, and between the darkness, between Celebrimbor’s present state, and between the fact that he could not feel one of his hands, Elrond did not think that was a real option, at present (He tried stretching the fingers on his numb, numb, _numb_ right hand. He might have done it. Elrond did not know. His eyes were fixed too anxiously on Celebrimbor, watching for any sign of listing, any sign of impending unconsciousness, to stray to his own right hand. Elrond might have managed to flex his right hand, but he honestly could not tell. Someone could be stabbing his right hand right now, and he wouldn’t be able to tell. Something to worry about, but not until he had gotten Celebrimbor sorted). He hadn’t wanted to stay in the cave, and he also did not want to dwell among the dead, let alone _sleep_ among them.

_There is going to be a great deal more slashing going on if they try to follow us in to wherever we’re sleeping tonight_ , Elrond thought grimly as he took his last step through the opening in the thick stone—so much thicker than the castle gates in the capital, but then, Lindon had never experienced a serious assault. There was a moment when it did not matter to him if he had to numb his entire body to keep the ghosts out of their sleeping quarters; in that moment, Elrond thought that if that was what it took for him to get as good of a night’s sleep as he was likely to find here, it did not seem like such a terrible sacrifice. When that blindingly furious moment had passed, Elrond put the thought away—no, he did not put it away; he shoved it away from him so quickly that he could hear it screaming in rage in the back of his mind at the insult for some time. The prospect of being so totally numb, of being unable to feel every last inch of flesh and bone in his body, was more terrible than any nightmare he had ever lived through, even the ones that dwelled in the fires raging in the center of the earth.

He could not be numb. He could not be numb. He could not be _helpless_. He could not be faced by threat and have his only option be to passively let it come to him and do with him as it would. Elrond would have to find another way to keep their sleeping quarters free of ghosts. _How_ he was to do that, he had no idea, but Elrond would find a way. He had to find a way.

Or…

Or, perhaps he would not be challenged in such a way, after all. Not tonight.

They had gotten all of the way through the castle gates, Elrond turning to try and shut them out, for all the good that would have done them when he had _watched_ at least one of the ghosts sink halfway into a wall already. Solid surfaces served as no impediment to these creatures, that much was already plain, but it was the _gesture_ , Elrond supposed, the gesture of it that was comforting to him, as useless as it would have been.

But as it turned out, shutting the castle gates was unnecessary even as a token gesture. The ghosts had still been following them, dozens upon dozens of corpse candle lights pouring out of every open doorway and shattered window, out of every shadowed alley and side-street. They were following them, and then they just—stopped. They all gathered outside of the castle gates, and they just stopped.

Elrond stared at the cluster of bobbing lights, for once meeting the gaze of dozens upon dozens of staring eyes without flinching. A combination of trepidation—why were they stopping?; what were they waiting for?; _who_ were they waiting for?—and prickling vexation—well, what _were_ they waiting for? Why not come here and confront them in the open?—shot through Elrond, hard and hot and pulsing at a discordant rate completely contrary to the pulse of his blood through his veins. He hadn’t wanted to risk numbing his body completely, but Elrond thought that even that might be better than the ghosts just… holding him in suspense, or whatever it was they were doing, as they stared at each other from across the threshold of the castle gates, and the ghosts waited for whatever it was they were waiting for, before they resumed following the two men into decrepit Himring Castle.

Of all the stories Elrond had ever been told or read of houseless spirits, he did not recall ever hearing of houseless spirits toying with the living people they were harrying in such a manner. He did not remember ever hearing tales of the houseless spirits of Edhil who yet had the wherewithal to do such a thing.

But then, the tales of houseless spirits he had been told had dealt always with the Úmanyar. The Calaquendi might be different. Elrond would not be surprised if the Calaquendi, they who had basked in the light of Telperion and Laurelin and taken so many gifts from the light of those Trees and the tutelage of the Rodyn, played by a different rulebook than that of the Úmanyar.

While Elrond was running all of these things through his shaky, racing mind, he’d not been paying too much attention to what Celebrimbor was doing. Concern was still running in the back of his mind, but it was hardly his greatest concern when he was dealing with a host of the dead, creatures of unknown abilities whose motives and present plan were completely inscrutable, and who had already done harm to them both.

That in mind, Elrond wasn’t paying too much attention to Celebrimbor. So when he felt a shaking hand settle heavily on his shoulder, Elrond jumped and whirled around, heart trying its level best to crawl out of his throat and flee through his open mouth, and it was with no small surprise that he found that hand connected to Celebrimbor’s arm, rather than that of a ghost’s.

Celebrimbor… did not look at all improved from when Elrond had forced that one ghost to let go of him. If anything, he looked _worse_. Though Elrond did not think he had been _injured_ by the encounter, not properly, anyways, Celebrimbor’s face looked as haggard and as bloodless as it would have had he been fighting for his life for the past several hours. Some of the damp on his face was rain, but though Elrond had no way of knowing for certain, could not smell any sort of difference between freshwater and saltwater in the middle of a storm on the middle of an island surrounded by Sea, where it was _always_ going to smell of salt, he thought some of the damp on Celebrimbor’s face was sweat, and some of it was tears. Celebrimbor’s pale eyes were markedly bloodshot, even in the gloom of late evening, made gloomier by the coal-black clouds hiding the sky from view. A vein was twitching in his jaw, his shoulders visibly trembling. He was listing ever so slightly to one side, but when Celebrimbor seemed at last to notice it, he set his left foot more firmly upon the ground, and swallowed hard.

“They can follow us no further.” His voice was hoarse, as hoarse as Elrond would have expected had Celebrimbor been spending the last hour or so screaming without so much as a five-second break. His voice was hoarse, but strong enough for Elrond to make out clearly, even over the din of the storm. “Thank my uncle. Leave them, Elrond. We must get out of this storm.”

Elrond would indeed thank Maedhros for his paranoia—he wasn’t going to accept any other explanation for it, thank you very much; what lord of the Eldar who was _not_ hopelessly paranoid would have planned for an invasion of the _dead_?—once they were out of the storm and he could find the wherewithal to form the words inside of his mind (Forming them inside of his mouth was probably going to be impossible, for many, _many_ reasons). For now, Elrond was all too happy to follow Celebrimbor’s advice, and retreat away from the castle gate as quickly as his feet could carry him.

Celebrimbor did not lead them to the entrance hall. Whether or not that had anything to do with not wanting to be anywhere near all of the mold when the conditions were ideal for its spread, Elrond could not guess; considering that the empty windows in the entrance hall were so very large and numerous, the fact that the entrance hall could not possibly have been sheltered enough from the wind and the rain for them to find a single dry spot in it might have had something to do with it at as well. Instead, Celebrimbor skirted around the edge of the castle proper until they found a rotted-out side door and Celebrimbor, fumbling on the mostly rotted wood for several seconds with clumsy hands, at last managed to fling this door open and stumble inside.

It was dark inside. Celebrimbor had not dug his lamp out of his pack. The raindrops pounding on Elrond’s body were striking against him so hard now that he wasn’t entirely certain that it would have felt any different had the raindrops in fact been hailstones. (He actually had to stop and check for a moment to make sure that they weren’t _actually_ hailstones.) Elrond shook his head and followed Celebrimbor inside. While there was a chance that Celebrimbor might not have been overly familiar with the passageways the servants used, this _had_ been a place where he had lived off and on for centuries. More than that, it was not like Nargothrond, where he had been a guest of his father’s cousin and would have been expected to act with the decorum of a member of the royal court. This was a castle that had been under the control of Celebrimbor’s own uncle, in a time when Celebrimbor was not yet estranged from any of his family. There would not have been anything suspicious about a member of the House of Fëanor moving along the arteries of servants’ passageways in a castle belonging to another member of the House of Fëanor with whom his relationship was yet untroubled. Elrond would just have to trust that Celebrimbor knew his way through the dark, and that he would not lead him into a hole in the floor through which they would fall, fall, fall until their bones were crushed in the unyielding embrace of stone.

Their passage through the damp, musty dark was not nearly as long as the passage they had taken through the bowels of the hill. Celebrimbor led him down a-ways—and that, Elrond could only tell because they were going down rough-hewn stone steps—in the dark, down a narrow passageway with no windows or side doors. Where exactly this was supposed to lead, Elrond could not guess. As they made their way down and through, he clutched at his numb right hand with his left, trying to chafe some feeling back into it, but nothing doing. There were no breaks in the skin that he could find, no patches of skin that were colder or warmer than the rest, but still, he could find no way to put the feeling back into his flesh. He could find no words to say, no points to press his fingertips against, no answer to this problem, and the question that kept running through his mind, over and over again, no relief to be found, no comfort to be found in those words:

When would it be normal again?

_Would_ it be normal again?

The pounding rain and crackling thunder were growing more and more remote, muffled by tons upon tons of sturdy stone, though occasionally even these stones that surrounded Elrond rattled when a particularly terrific boom of thunder echoed far, far above. It was just when it was finally getting to the point that Elrond was looking towards the ceiling, frowning, wondering if the rain had stopped or if he had finally gone so far beneath the surface of the castle that he could no longer hear it (and entertaining a third possibility, that the weight of the stone was so tremendous that it simply blocked out the noise completely, even if he was not so far under the surface as all that) that the ground evened out, and they came to another door.

This door was considerably less rotted than the one that Celebrimbor had led them to when they were running through the rain, though later, when they had a bit more light, Elrond would look at it and mark the patterns of holes in the wood of the door, like the inverse of the constellations of stars in the night sky, where the woodworms had found a good meal, once upon a time. The door was in better shape, but it was not locked. Celebrimbor pushed it open so easily that Elrond was not certain that the door even had a _latch_ , let alone a lock.

The hinges screamed in such a fashion as Elrond had not heard since the earth was breaking before his eyes. Celebrimbor at last took the lamp from his pack, and incandescent blue light lit up a large chamber set with tables, many fireplaces with chimneys that snaked up past the ceiling, and a large series of what Elrond at first thought were wardrobes lined up against one of the walls, but upon a second glance he realized were ovens.

“Are these the kitchens?” he asked uncertainly.

“It’s one of the kitchens,” Celebrimbor muttered, as he made his way further into the chamber. “It’s not the main kitchen. This one made meals for the soldiers on guard. But the main kitchens have windows, and I would like to sleep somewhere dry.”

Elrond couldn’t argue with that.

These kitchens _were_ , in fact, quite dry. Asides from the sound of dripping, and that could be quite confidently traced back to Elrond and Celebrimbor and the puddles forming at their feet, even after their descent through another dry passageway to get here, there was no water anywhere that Elrond could see. There was a structure near the center of the room that he thought might have once been a well—though considering the present state of this once-hill, now-island, Elrond did not trust any water coming out of a well here not to be complete and total saltwater (Of course, the other possibility was that that was some sort of trash pit, but that possibility did not occur to Elrond until much later). They would be fine until the ship came for them, as far as things to drink were concerned. Elrond had brought plenty of water with him, he had no doubt that Celebrimbor had done the same, and even if they had not, the amount of time they expected to stay in Himring was not nearly enough time for an Edhel to die of thirst. If Elrond had more Mannish blood in him, if he had chosen as Elros had chosen, perhaps there would have been trouble. But as it stood now, Elrond was not overly worried about the water situation. As far as the water situation went, he thought he had more to fear from drowning than from dying of thirst.

Elrond was not overly worried about the water situation. As to everything else…

He still couldn’t feel his hand. It just sat on the end of his right arm, about as useful as it would have been had his hand just been cut off entirely. Elrond was discovering just how useless his right hand was, right now, now that he finally had somewhere he could set down his pack.

It wasn’t something you could do one-handed, you know. Elrond was not at all interested in having his pack slide off of his back by accident, especially not considering the fact that there were plenty of breakable things in his pack, and especially not considering that, even with how skeptical he was about whether or not you could really call travel rations _food_ , they were still the only major source of sustenance Elrond had, for as long as he was here.

Elrond could go three days without water. He could go three days without food (No, he had not forgotten the blackberry bushes, but even as heavily laden with blackberries as they had been, even if all of the berries they had left on the bushes were still intact after the storm had quit its fury, he really did not think there were enough blackberries out past the village walls to replace the travel rations he had brought with him, if something was to happen to those). That did not mean that going three days without water or three days without food would be at all _pleasant_.

In that interest, he wished to get his pack _off_ , and to do so without damaging any of the contents. Easily enough done under normal circumstances. Under _normal_ circumstances, he had two working hands, and his hands were quite deft, if he did say so himself. But under _these_ circumstances, a ghost had decided to accost his traveling companion, and Elrond, in the process of warding that ghost off, had managed to injure himself.

He kept trying to make his fingers work. He kept trying to make any part of his hand work. He kept trying to undo the straps and buckles he needed to undo on that side of his body, in order to get his pack off. He _needed_ to undo these straps and buckles on each side of his body at the same time, if he wanted to get his pack off without listing to one side and falling clean over. Elrond had never had much luck getting the pack off when he was sitting down; there wasn’t enough room, either for the straps, or for the pack. It had to be like this, and…

“Did you hurt your hand while we were outside?” Celebrimbor asked softly. His normal level of animation had not returned to him, but his gaze as he watched Elrond fumble with his numb right hand was a little sharper than the dull barely-there quality his eyes had possessed nearly all afternoon.

This… Elrond had to swallow down a deflection. This was no time for his tender pride. Given Celebrimbor’s own encounter with that same ghost, Elrond doubted he would go spreading around stories of Elrond’s own blunder, doubted he would go spreading around stories that would reinforce the hapless qualities of his existing reputation. Even if that story did get out, considering how much worse off Celebrimbor had come from the encounter, Elrond didn’t think he would come out of it looking too bad.

This was no time for his tender pride. As much as he would have liked it otherwise, he could not hide what had become of his hand forever. He was right-handed. If his hand wasn’t back to normal by morning, it would become apparent to Celebrimbor that something was wrong when Elrond went to write notes and he either made a mess of things trying to write with a hand he couldn’t feel, or he made a mess of things trying to write with a hand that he had never put a quill or pen or stylus in in his life. No matter when he chose to make clear just what it was that was wrong, Elrond would not be doing it on his own terms. That much was clear to him now. But if he did it now, he could at least salvage some of his dignity, whereas if he waited until he was fumbling with his stylus tomorrow morning, he would just look like a child who was foolishly determined to hide that something had gone wrong with him even when he was in the company of someone who might have been able to help. Granted, it wasn’t _likely_ that Celebrimbor knew something that could help, but ignoring the fact that he _might_ know something that could help was just the sort of immature behavior that Elrond was trying to prove wasn’t part of his character with this mission.

This was no time for his tender pride. Elrond took a deep breath, steeled himself, and explained, “When I cut the arm of the ghost accosting you, something… happened.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “I… It’s difficult to explain. Suddenly, my dagger was cold as ice, and my hand was numb.” Suddenly feeling the urge to try at humor, lame as it might have been, Elrond remarked with false jauntiness, “Funny, they were the fire of the spirit with no flesh to contain them. You would think I would have felt great heat, instead.”

Whatever Elrond had been hoping to accomplish with that attempt at humor—even he wasn’t certain—it did not hit its mark. There was no relief in the gloomy cast of Celebrimbor’s face. Instead, his eyes yet fixed on Elrond’s right hand, narrowed just a little bit. “It’s numb? Completely?” He snorted. “If that was all that happened to me when it touched me, I think I would have considered that a fair bargain. An easy bargain,” he muttered bitterly, looking away.

To that, Elrond frowned, momentarily distracted from his own struggles. “What… What was it that happened to you when the ghost touched you, exactly?”

He had seen the ghost stop Celebrimbor in his tracks. He had seen it render him completely immobile. But now, Elrond was looking back on the memory of Celebrimbor’s darting eyes, and wondering if there had not been more to it than that. Living Edhil had many gifts, and some of them had more potent gifts, more ambiguous gifts, than others. When they died, when they were rendered spirits without flesh, when they yet dwelled in the world, even if they were not fully part of it, did they retain those gifts? Could they yet affect the living with them?

Celebrimbor did not answer him. Instead, he stepped forward, reaching out his hands. “Then let me help you,” he offered, less an assertion and more something that had the skin of a plea, and appealing eyes.

That was… Elrond couldn’t remember how long it had been since he had last needed someone’s help in getting articles of clothing or other items off of his body. He was reasonably certain that his age had been something that could be related with just one digit. Ever since he had gotten to the point that he no longer needed help in dressing himself or putting on armor or things like travel packs, he had shunned the hands of others, even when it would have been better to let them help him. The last time someone had taken his armor off for him, it was because Elrond had broken his arm in the battle he had fought after putting his armor on by himself. Outside of battle, he had always avoided clothes so complicated that he would have needed help getting them on or off—even when he came to live in the royal court and had access to considerably finer clothing than anything he had ever enjoyed in the Lisgardh or the roving camp of the Fëanorians, even when he lived in a court where the fashions tended towards the complicated, Elrond had gravitated towards simpler clothing, clothing he would never have needed someone else to help him into or out of. Unless he was injured.

Elrond couldn’t sleep in his pack. He couldn’t reach his canteen, his spare canteen, or any of his packs of travel rations with his pack on. There was no one here to witness it. And Celebrimbor…

Elrond thought he could allow it, if it was Celebrimbor. Celebrimbor wouldn’t say anything about it to others. Celebrimbor might tease him about it later—Elrond wasn’t entirely willing to put that past him, but then, he wasn’t willing to put something of that sort past _anyone_ —but he wouldn’t mock him, and he wouldn’t tease in front of others. It would be alright. He thought it would be alright.

“…Very well.”

Elrond had already marked the gentleness of Celebrimbor’s hands, greater than what he would have expected of a man of his history and occupation. What he experienced now was something else entirely, as Celebrimbor bent his head and bent his will to his task. Gentle and deft were his hands as they moved between the buckles and straps that held Elrond’s pack to his back. It was a deftness of a man who’d no doubt put on and taken off his own armor more times than he cared to remember, and as this went on, Elrond began to wonder if he hadn’t helped others in this endeavor, as well.

How long was the road between Himlad and Nargothrond? How much longer was that road when they must take a circuitous route, when the shortest road was too perilous and they must be wary and take even longer routes than normal, in order to avoid the raiding parties that never seemed to lose any numbers, never seemed to stop coming, never seemed to tire of murder and torment? It was possible that those among the Edhil who had fled from Himlad had never taken off their armor the entire time they were fleeing to the nearest safe place that was not cut off from them by rivers and seas of fire. It was possible, but not terribly likely. Sleeping in armor was… not impossible, but also deeply unpleasant. And there had to come a time when the clothing under the armor was stripped off, changed out, and washed, for sanitary purposes, if nothing else.

So, during the trip from Himlad to Nargothrond, there must have come a time when Celebrimbor, his father, and his uncle, Celegorm, had to take off their armor.

Elrond knew little of Curufin and Celegorm, except for the violent part they had played in the courtship of his great-grandmother and great-grandfather. It occurred to him that this could not be the sum of their characters, could not possibly be such. They had been very good at playing second-string villains in the tale of Beren and Lúthien, and it was difficult at times for Elrond to remember that there was anything beyond that (neither Maedhros nor Maglor had ever spoken of them, not to Elrond and Elros, not to the _direct descendants_ of those two lovers whom these two brothers had tried their best to make star-crossed and _keep_ star-crossed; Elrond had never quite understood why, expect to suppose that they might have considered it a bit tacky), but when he thought about it logically, he supposed that there must have been.

The pair of them had been the most involved in Celebrimbor’s upbringing of any members of the House of Fëanor, once Celebrimbor’s mother (he did not know her name, had never thought to ask her name; he needed to rectify that error, sometime soon) had refused to follow her small child and marital family across the wide and merciless Sea. There were many who would remark upon children who became what they were in spite of the people who had raised them. Many of those had had Elrond and Elros in mind when they spoke. Elrond… He had never supported such a line of thought, honestly. He had never seen himself as someone who had become what he was in spite of the people who had raised him. Every last part of him, every last sharp and jagged edge, every last nightmare that dogged his steps, every last ache that stayed with him no matter where he went, these things were him because of the way he had been raised. They were him, because of everyone who had raised him. He could not escape them if he tried.

Celebrimbor had been raised by Curufin and by Celegorm. There were others who had had a hand in his raising, many others, if we were being very honest, but these two were the ones who had had the greatest amount of involvement, the ones who would have had the greatest _impact_. Elrond… couldn’t imagine what that impact was, honestly. There was such a disconnect between the events that had made Curufin and Celegorm uniquely infamous among their brethren, even though they (along with Caranthir, who thanks to his involvement with the Haladin was considerably _less_ infamous than the two brothers who had died alongside him) had died earlier than Amrod and Amras, and much earlier than Maedhros, and every last thing Elrond knew of Celebrimbor. But there must be some sort of connection. There must be _some_ connective tissue that bound them together.

At some point, Curufin must have taught his son how to put on and then remove armor properly. It was such an integral part of training to survive battle after battle after battle. Maglor had not left it to others, when it had been time to teach Elrond and Elros. Elrond could not imagine what the _teaching_ must have been like, when it had come to Celebrimbor and his father. He should not have been trying to imagine it. He should not have been curious. The curiosity ran parallel to all that Elrond wished to leave in the past, except for the times when the paths were no longer parallel but instead intersected; it was a strain of thought he should never have strayed anywhere near.

Curiosity was always stronger than _sense_ , though, wasn’t it? Elrond was imagining it, now.

If it was Curufin who had taught Celebrimbor, Elrond thought he must have taught him well. Celebrimbor went about his business—it was not the same as removing armor, not quite, but the network of straps and buckles was close enough to provide a close comparison—with calm, gentle efficiency, his clever hands moving so very close to flesh, but never really imposing upon it. He was likely expert in the task of pulling breastplates off of wounded soldiers without jostling bruised or broken ribs. He may have had occasion to do so many times.

When Elrond was able to put aside the anxiety over his hand and the humiliation of being unable to do it for himself, this was… not unpleasant. He would still have rather he was able to do it for himself, but if someone else had to do it for him, it wasn’t unpleasant, for the person undoing all of the straps and buckles of his pack to be someone who could perform the task without poking or prodding or—imposing.

(There was a part of Elrond that thought he wouldn’t have minded a little imposing. That part of him was ruthlessly quashed, replaced with concerns about his hand and the storm and the ghosts and every last thing about this place that had been assailing him since he had first set foot through the castle gates.)

“There,” Celebrimbor muttered, not quite meeting Elrond’s gaze as he helped Elrond set the pack on the earthen floor. “That should do it, I think.” His lips were pressed tightly together, nostrils flaring as he drew a deep breath.

Elrond nodded, taking a moment to find his tongue before murmuring in return, “Thank you.” His voice sounded hoarse, and he hated nothing quite so much as that hoarse quality.

They took their seats on that hard-packed earthen floor, which while even more unyielding than sleeping on the earth would have been, was at least dry and completely free of mold. Elrond… was not looking forward to spreading out his pallet, actually. While his pack was designed to keep out as much rainwater as possible, given the torrent he’d been walking and then running through, he could not imagine that his sleeping pallet was entirely _dry_. Though it was decently warm in here, it was hardly warm enough for his pallet to dry out in the time it would take for him to eat his supper.

(There was another reason why Elrond wasn’t looking forward to spreading out his pallet. There was another reason he wasn’t looking forward to sleeping. He was not certain whether sleeping on this floor would count as sleeping on the earth. Before, sleeping _outside_ had always been a requirement for the most strange and vivid of his dreams; at least, sleeping on something other than a bed had always been associated with sleeping outside, for Elrond. But they had clearly gone underground to be here. Elrond had never slept so, ensconced within the earth. He did not know what sorts of dreams he would have, sleeping on the floor of this kitchen, beneath the surface of the earth. The lack of knowledge was far from comforting.)

Celebrimbor set the little sack of blackberries out between them, next to his lamp. “I had actually forgotten about these,” he admitted, as he dug out a few blackberries to pop into his mouth.

Elrond had as well. He eyed the sack with some ambivalence, biting back a sigh even as his stomach began to growl piteously. There was little he wanted less than to supper purely on travel rations when he had set before him an option to have _actual_ food along with the rations, even if that food was unripe fruit. And perhaps, even if neither of them had had any hunger for actual food alongside their rations, there would still have been something that drew them into the town in time for the dead to show themselves. Perhaps they would still have caught sight of the bobbing lights from within the confines of the castle.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Elrond stared down at his right hand, his stomach churning. It seemed a high price to pay just to have some blackberries with their supper.

Elrond clicked his tongue, and reached forward—with his left hand, though given that this didn’t require much in the way of fine motor control, he was at least able to do it without much trouble—into the sack for some blackberries.

They ate in silence for a while, Elrond chewing unenthusiastically on what honestly felt like a _brick_ of hardtack. As he ate, he watched Celebrimbor. He had hoped that perhaps food would revive him, would return him to the state he had known him to inhabit in the capital, and on the first day or so of their journey north to the port. Granted, when Celebrimbor had been in _that_ state, he had been—

But if Celebrimbor had been in that state, Elrond would not have worried.

_What happened to him when the ghost laid hands upon him?_

That was a question. It was not the only question. Far from it.

Elrond took a deep breath.

“Are we going to talk about this?” he asked flatly. It was a brazen question, he knew, when there was so much he did not wish to talk about, so much he would keep chained inside for as long as he was able, until the moment came when someone arrived to smash those chains the way the Rodyn had smashed all of Morgoth’s hiding places at the end of the war.

Celebrimbor tilted his head to one side. “Speak of what, exactly?” he asked in return, in a tone almost disinterested, if not for the sudden sharpness honing the edge of that last word.

Elrond bit his lip, before he dropped his gaze back down to his food. Speak of what, indeed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Araw** —Oromë
> 
> **Anor** —the Sindarin name for the Sun  
>  **Calaquendë** —"Elf of the light"; an Elf who had come to Aman from Cuiviénen, or was born in Aman, especially during the Years of the Trees; one of the Vanyar, the Ñoldor or the Falmari (plural: Calaquendi) (Quenya)  
>  **Calaquendi** —“Elves of the Light”; the Elves who came to Aman from Cuiviénen, or were born there, especially those born during the Years of the Trees and had born witness to their light; the Vanyar, the Ñoldor, and the Falmari (singular: Calaquendë) (Quenya)  
>  **Edhel** —Elf (plural: Edhil) (Sindarin)  
>  **Edhil** —Elves (singular: Edhel) (Sindarin)  
>  **Eldar** —‘People of the Stars’ (Quenya); a name first given to the Elves by Oromë when he found them by Cuiviénen, but later came to refer only to those who answered the summons to Aman and set out on the March, with those who chose to remain by Cuiviénen coming to be known as the Avari; the Eldar were composed of these groups: the Vanyar, Ñoldor (those among them who chose to go to Aman), and the Teleri (including their divisions: the Lindar, Falmari, Sindar and Nandor).  
>  **Ennor** —Middle-Earth (Sindarin)  
>  **Iathrim** —the Sindar of Doriath  
>  **Laegrim** —the Green-Elves of Ossiriand (singular: Laegel) (plural: Laegil; Laegrim is class-plural term); the division of the Nandor who followed Denethor, son of Lenwë; the name was imposed upon them by the Sindar, because of the lush forests of their land, because of their especial love for the forests and waters of their land, and because the Laegrim often dressed in green as camouflage  
>  **Lisgardh** —A marshy region by the Mouths of Sirion, a land of reeds that grow man-high and dense as a forest. Its name in earlier drafts was ‘Arlisgion,’ translated in The Book of Lost Tales 2 as “the place of reeds” (155).  
> Rodyn—Valar (singular: Rodon) (Sindarin): a common Sindarin name for the Valar  
>  **Úmanyar** —'Those not of Aman' (singular: Úmanya—probably) (adjectival form: Úmanyarin); those Elves who did not make the journey to Aman, and/or were not born there


	14. Chapter Fourteen

Sleep was slow in finding Elrond, that night. The only source of light down in this underground (or perhaps it was not, and making his way here through complete darkness had left him confused about how far down they had walked) kitchen was Celebrimbor’s lamp, and truth be told, Elrond had never slept very well when such was the only source of light to be found. He did not have the intense horror of the dark that some of the Exiles in the royal court, they who had been born into a realm of eternal light and who associated the sudden advent of darkness with destruction and death and _evil_ , possessed within themselves.

In some of them, so intense was the horror that there had been nights, nights which would have had no moonlight to start with since Ithil had chosen to hide his face, but which had no _starlight_ thanks to heavy cloud cover, when Elrond had woken in the middle of the night to hear the muffled sobbing of one person or another, somewhere far down the hall, and after many years in the court, he no longer had to guess at the cause. He had mixed more than one tonic for the source of one of those muffled sobbing fits. He knew. The light of the Trees had blessed the Calaquendi with many gifts, and fortitude against darkness had not been one of them. Such was for his lot, to brave the darkness when he had never known a world that did not have darkness for its own.

But Elrond _had_ known darkness, and with darkness came the knowledge of all the things that darkness could _hide_. He remembered what had happened when the fires burned low. Oh, the wolves and the bears and the Orcs and the children of Men who had turned bandit had still come when the campfires burned high, but when the fires guttered low, they still came, and the sentries did not notice them until they were much, much closer to the camp. Sometimes, they did not notice them until they were right upon them, and then Elrond was scrambling for his sword or his dagger, whichever was closer at hand, and praying that the fact that he’d taken off his armor to sleep would not now spell his doom. Even in his chambers at court, Elrond preferred to sleep with a candle burning, even if he did shut it up in a lantern to lessen the chance that it would catch at anything. Even in his chambers at court, he preferred it when Ithil showed its face in full and there were no clouds to obscure its light.

The dead could not follow them into the castle, and Elrond had seen no animals on the island (He was only now beginning to wonder if there was a connection between the presence of the dead and the absence of any animals; he would have expected sea birds, surely). This was probably the safest place he could have been sleeping, on all of Tol Himling. And yet, Elrond would have liked more light.

One lamp and one lamp only, even a lamp of this particular lamp’s construction and placed where this particular lamp had been placed (Elrond had not expected the rusting hook in the ceiling that Celebrimbor had hung the lamp from to actually hold, but it seemed the stones of the castle were not the only thing that retained their strength long after they ought to have come to nothing), felt a poor talisman against the dark that encroached on all sides from the boundary of the lamp’s light. Morning would not bring relief, for there were no windows here, and no doorways close enough to the surface to let sunlight find its way down. If something was to happen to the lamp, it would be all fumbling through the dark, no matter _what_ time of day it was.

On top of that, Elrond’s pallet was indeed wet when he rolled it out onto the floor. It was not _sopping_ wet, at least, but Elrond preferred _dry_ bedding, thank you very much, and his damp blankets and pillows were very much not that. In the mornings, he thought he could accept it if he woke up and found that the morning dew had left his blankets damp. That was unavoidable, and besides that, it was _morning_ , and he would thus not be spending much time with these damp blankets, anyways.

But here, they were underground, and what was a warm night up above was a cool night down below, and what was a cool night in dry conditions, the damp of his bedding turned to cold. Sticky, humid cold that made Elrond feel as if something or someone was lying on top of him, waiting for the first sign of his comprehension as the signal to begin applying more pressure than what his lungs could bear. There had been other nights when he had slept in such conditions. They had been the same nights when Elrond had had most cause to fear what lurked in the shadows that encroached after a guttering campfire, actually.

Sleeping on the earthen floor with nothing between his flesh and the earth held no appeal, though. Elrond slept on top of his damp blankets, and tried his best to ignore the way the water slowly soaked through his clothes (those few patches that had not gotten completely soaked in the storm, anyways), further wetting and further chilling his skin. He had no better options. Perhaps if he left his bedding down here in the morning, then by tomorrow night it would be dry, but in this moment, this was just going to have to do.

Sleep was slow in finding Elrond, huddled on top of his damp bedding in a room that was utterly dark aside from the lamp hanging from a rusting hook on the ceiling. The noises of the storm were muffled almost completely out of existence, but occasionally, the vibrations of the thunder still found their way down here, rattling the earth below Elrond’s prone form and jarring him from a doze back into full wakefulness. But eventually, exhaustion did what a comfortable bed in a dry room was not present to accomplish, and Elrond fell asleep.

Almost the moment that sleep found him, the dreams found him, too.

There were lights all around him, bobbing and flickering balls of blue fire that gave off no heat and lit up nothing but themselves. So great a multitude were they that Elrond would have thought himself surrounded by a swarm of fireflies, except that he had never known any fireflies so large, nor any that put off such iridescent blue light. He thought that his childhood, fumbling through many a lightless night, might have been very different, had these been a feature of them.

The Sea was in Elrond’s ears, and it was not singing but roaring, pouring out its grief and its fury upon the hapless shoreline. The Sea was pouring from Elrond’s ears and from his mouth and from his eyes, filling up all the dry lands of the world, flooding vale and farmland and city and cave, drowning out every voice that did not resonate with its own.

For a long moment, he just watched, stock-still and oddly content, as every light that was not the light of the balls of fire that swirled all around him was extinguished, replaced by wall after wall of white-capped black water. But then, Elrond noticed something that jarred contentment out of his bones so quickly he reeled.

The Sea was a thief. As it poured from him, it took bits and pieces of him with him, long strands of red like seaweed ripped from its beds and tossed up into the shallows swirling at his feet before rushing away at great speed. He tore off after it, but every wave pushed him back like a dozen hands all shoving him down to the ground at once. The Sea just kept pouring from him, and the Sea just kept taking and taking and taking from him, and the more he ran, the more the Sea took, and the more the Sea took, the less Elrond cared about what it was taking, and the less Elrond cared about what the Sea was taking from him, the louder his own voice became in the terrible chorus of voices rumbling and booming and _screaming_ out of the Sea.

Eventually, Elrond just stopped. He stood in the Sea with the water lapping around his waist, the red that had once been inside of him unspooling and unraveling and unfurling all around him, before it was surging away from him, further out and out, and he could see it no more. But he could hear it. No, he could hear _himself_. Oh, he could hear himself, the voice that had been ripped out of him with everything else that the Sea had stolen. The more he listened, the more he heard. The more he heard, the louder Elrond’s stolen voice became, until it eclipsed all the rest, until the Sea was mute before it, until Elrond listened to the roaring of the Sea and all he heard was himself.

He knew his voice. He knew none of the words his voice told to him. To know them, Elrond would have needed a heart, and the Sea had unraveled his heart and ripped out the strands through his open mouth.

Reeds were growing up through the water, tall and thick. Elrond knew these reeds, had seen them before, but seeing them again inspired nothing within him. He was empty. The Sea had hollowed him out and made him like a gourd the Laegrim would hollow out and poke holes in and hang up in their open windows to make music when the wind blew through them. He presented an image that others might find pleasing, but there was nothing inside. There was nothing inside to respond to the growing of the reeds with anything resembling _emotion._

The reeds were growing taller and the waters were receding accordingly, until the dark water that had swirled around Elrond’s waist now sloshed at his ankles, bubbling and popping as air escaped from the sand glistening just below the surface. Soon, the reeds were as tall as Elrond himself, some of them taller, and the lights flitted in and out of the reed-forest, weaving an erratic, dancing path through the network of rustling reeds. They did not seem to move with any true purpose; they did not seem to move with any true _will_. They were tracing paths that others had traced, long ago, just following the paths that others had once marked out. There was no need to move with purpose or will, when they were following in the footsteps of others.

As the waters pushed back, inch by inch, drop by drop, the reeds were getting taller, yes, but something else was rising up as well, soaring out of the dark and the mists.

Elrond watched a white tower creep up towards the roof of the sky, brick by brick, soaring up and up with no fear of either wind or storm or battering, merciless water. There _was_ something roiling in the air around the tower, and in the moment before Elrond understood what it was that he was seeing, he thought that perhaps he was wrong, and that the tower was collapsing, plummeting into the Sea, brick by brick by brick.

But that was not what he was seeing, not at all. Once Elrond had long enough of looking to understand just what it was he was seeing, he could see that what roiled in the sky around the white tower were not bricks, were not any sort of stones, not at all. They had wings that flapped and mouths that cried out with voices that did not resonate with the furious Sea or the tempest that Elrond’s stolen voice had made of it.

The white tower was surrounded by flocks upon flocks of long-winged white seabirds that flew back and forth across the boundaries of the tower, searching for any purchase or any means inside. They never found any, but this seemed not to discourage them, for they just kept flying round and round the walls of the tower, just kept up their raucous, discordant cries, screeching louder and louder in defiance of the Sea and its stolen voice.

Elrond’s eyes, once they lit upon the tower, were riveted upon it, and he found himself utterly unable to tear his gaze away. The white tower cut against the dark sky like a finger of dawn reaching out prematurely into the night, a presage of day to serve as a comfort to those whose horror of the dark was so great that they spent every dark hour praying for the return of sunlight. There was…

There was a single window, far at the top of the tower. The bricks had only just now come up high enough to reveal it, and the birds clustered around it, though as far as Elrond could see, none of them ever flew inside.

Elrond’s eyes had been riveted upon the tower, and now that they had traveled up to the window, they were riveted upon the window in particular, gaze trapped upon the dark opening, unable to travel away.

There should have been something in the darkness that that window opened upon. Elrond had no idea _where_ that idea had come from, let alone what he thought should have been in the window. But he was feeling something for the first time since the Sea had stolen everything that had been vital inside of him, _really_ feeling something, when he looked upon the dark and empty window. There should have been something in the dark window, cutting a gash into the shadow within the white tower. Elrond watched the window, and he found himself waiting, _longing_ , for that something, whatever it was, to show itself. More than that, he wanted, _longed_ , to cross the reed forest with its narrow pathways and its erratic, perhaps-treacherous guides, to go see it for himself, to see if there was any door at the base of the tower by which he could have gained access.

Elrond knew what it was he wanted. He always knew what it was he wanted, even when he pretended otherwise, even when he would not acknowledge it, even when he _could not_ acknowledge it. He was not lucky enough to be blessed with that level of self-ignorance. He knew himself, even when what he knew was borderline-incomprehensible. But it was rare that he was ever able to look at what he wanted and then _pursue_ it, not in the world he inhabited. There were many roads to what he wanted, and he had found all of them shattered in one place or another. It was the only constant, was it not, that he would eventually find the cobblestones shattered as if with a sledgehammer and the ground on which they had been set shattered as if by one of the feet of the Rodyn.

In this case, the roots binding Elrond to the watery ground were too deep and too strong for him to rip them up and follow one of the winding paths to the base of the tower. It was his lot to stay here, and not cross over to that other place. It was his lot to be the one who stayed, to be the one who remained after all those who could have fled had fled, to be the pillar that marked out the world as it had once been, even if he was the only piece of evidence that the world had ever been other than what it was now. He could not go to the tower.

But he wanted to. He wanted it more than anything else he had ever wanted in his life. He wanted to go to the tower, and see what there was to see inside. There was a great secret whose answer was found within the white stones of the tower, and Elrond did not know why, but he felt as if the answer to this secret would have been the answer to every question he had ever had. It was a ridiculous thing to contemplate, considering how disparate his questions were, and yet, there it was.

Elrond could not go to the tower. His roots ran too deep, and the core of wanting within him was not strong enough to replace all else that the Sea had stolen from him. He just watched, and watched, and watched.

-0-0-0-

The dreams were not always the worst part of the night. That much, Elrond would readily concede. The dreams were never pleasant, not really—Elrond had known few truly pleasant dreams, in his life; even the ones that were not actively distressing had enough elements of bizarre strangeness to them that, if he carried them with him into the waking world, he could not carry them with him with any true pleasure, for how disconcerting they were—but they were not always the worst he had to contend with, in the dark of the night, sleeping in the embrace of the earth. When he had been a child growing to manhood in the care of those who had obtained his care through violence, and then spent the rest of his and his brother’s childhood trying to atone for it, there had been all the dangers of sleeping out in the open in a lawless, broken land when death was the only true ruler over all. The dreams held Elrond fast in their grip, and unless someone went out of their way to wake him, he was unlikely to wake up until the dreams had run their course. Light sleeper Elrond might have been, but not so light that he didn’t occasionally need to be shaken awake as their encampment was being attacked.

The dreams were not always the worst part of the night. Sometimes, Elrond woke up to find that the waking world had decided that he needed a test on just how quickly he could rouse himself to defend his own life against those who felt that life was testing _them_ on how many people they could kill before the camp at large awoke and took up their arms. It was for reasons like this that Elrond had a hard time believing _anyone_ who said that his bloodline was a lucky one. Who could believe that a man who’d been attacked while he was sleeping more times than he could even _remember_ nowadays had any luck other than that which most people would have sooner traded in for a half-starved nag a shifty trader was trying to sell to you for at least half again as much as it was actually worth?

(On that note, Elrond hoped their horses were doing well in the port. Rosehip had seemed a docile-enough horse, but he wondered how well she would do cooped up in a stable for days on end.)

On this night, at least, Elrond did not have to worry about any attackers. The ghosts were trapped outside of the castle gates, the Orcs of Angband had met their fates long ago, and Elrond would be surprised if there was any animal on this island that could have given him any trouble that was larger than a stinging fly. He had his dagger—the incident with that one ghost had not damaged it, thankfully—but Elrond did not think he would have any need for it, except perhaps to cut up a particularly stubborn piece of jerky, if he happened to find any more jerky in his travel rations.

The dreams were not always the worst part of the night. This did not always translate into Elrond finding himself awakened by the cold kiss of a blade at his throat. Sometimes, it was his back bothering him, instead.

_You would think that this, of all things, would not be a problem for me. My upbringing was hardly what anyone would call pampered. I did not grow up sleeping on featherbeds in Menegroth. My first bed was a cot with a mattress so thin that I used to spend nights when I could not sleep counting the slats on the bedframe. My bed in Amon Ereb was hardly any better. After Amon Ereb, it was pallets on the ground for_ years _before I finally came to Lindon. I’ve spent more years than not sleeping on the ground; one would think that it would be_ beds _that were strange to me._

One would think that. And yet…

Elrond shifted his weight, and immediately regretted the decision when a muscle in his back—he forgot which one; that required a bit more wakefulness than he currently possessed—began to scream protest in the most strident tones imaginable. This was worse than sleeping on the side of the road on the way to the port had been; at least there, the springy grass had provided some meager level of cushioning. By the time it was time for them to get up—though how they were ever to know when morning had dawned from down here, Elrond had absolutely no idea—Elrond would be more surprised that his entire body had not been rendered one single, mottled bruise than he would to come to the surface and find that drowned Beleriand had risen from the Sea and the ghosts of Edhil and Men and Orcs were fighting over who would claim dominion over all of the cemeteries and burial pits.

Elrond really hoped that this assignment would be enough to give him the sort of reputation that would see Gil-galad become less apprehensive regarding letting him travel. More than that, Elrond hoped Gil-galad would _appreciate_ this. The man had had his own fair share of nights sleeping rough; he knew _just_ how unpleasant it could and often did get when you were sleeping on the ground, especially if the weather decided to involve itself in any way, shape, or form.

Well, he was unlikely to get back to sleep right now, not with such _lavish_ accommodations as a damp pallet on the earthen floor of what had once been a kitchen. As long as he was trapped in wakefulness, Elrond might as well add a little more to the preliminary report. As it was, it was in no fit state to be handed over to Gil-galad, but he might be able to clarify some of his own thoughts regarding this place, even to himself.

It was better than thinking about the dream. It was easier than surrendering to a sleep that might plunge him into yet more dreams. There was that, as well.

And _yes_ , Elrond did recognize that he was likely to pay for it come the morning if he spent only a small fraction of the night actually sleeping. All-nighters were hardly a foreign concept to him, and their consequences no more foreign than they. Still, it seemed that, one way or another, he would not be at his best come the morning, and if he had a choice on the _means_ , he might as well go for the least painful of the three.

Elrond reached for his pack.

With his right hand.

Except, as he reached out, he could not immediately perceive that he had a right hand at all.

The scream was out of his mouth a moment before he could stop it, a moment _after_ he _remembered_. Holding his arm up to the light and letting his frantic, darting eyes rest on his numb, leaden hand could do so much that the mind _should_ have been able to do on its own, but the mind had not been fully awake and memory had still been sleeping and the lamp might light up so much of the room but his body still cast its own shadows and—

And none of this was sufficient cause to excuse the fact that he had screamed. Elrond sat on his pallet, heart still hammering sickly-fast in his chest, breath still coming from his mouth in ragged gasps, even though he knew that it had been ridiculous, even though he knew now what his still-drowsing mind, and still-sleeping memory had not comprehended.

None of that excused the fact that he had screamed. Especially not when there were more to hear it than just him.

“Elrond?” Another man who had no doubt long ago learned the merits of sleeping lightly in a strange place, especially if there had been strange goings-on while he was awake, even before the echoes of the scream had finished reverberating against the walls of the kitchen, Celebrimbor was sitting up, weight braced on his elbows, blinking sleep out of his bloodshot eyes. “What is it?” Celebrimbor asked blearily, and if his voice sounded more slurred than sleep would normally have accounted for, Elrond was hardly in a position to _judge_ him, now was he?

Elrond ducked his head, so that his hair (tangled, as if he did not already have enough to be dealing with) shielded his face from Celebrimbor’s gaze. Blue as the light of the lamp was, he did not think it would have hidden how rapidly his face was reddening. “It’s nothing,” he muttered. “I had a nightmare, is all.” And if that was not _exactly_ a truthful answer to Celebrimbor’s question, it was close enough that Elrond refused to feel any guilt over it. He _refused_. Celebrimbor had asked him a _question_ , not to be burdened with Elrond’s own insecurities.

Of course, Elrond had not been counting on Celebrimbor’s memory needing less time than his own to awaken after the body it belonged to awakened.

“How’s your hand?” Celebrimbor asked, and though his voice was soft, his words cut through the newly-renewed silence of the room like the crack of a whip.

They _felt_ like the crack of a whip as well. Elrond flinched, drawing his hand—he’d chosen to go to sleep with Celebrimbor on his right hand side, a decision he was now beginning to regret—into his lap, out of Celebrimbor’s reach, though given that their pallets were set up perhaps two feet away from each other, all Celebrimbor would really have to do to close the gap between them would be to either sit all the way up or lie all the way down, and stretch. It was a futile gesture, and Elrond knew it. There was little comfort in it. He could easily gauge his strength in comparison to Celebrimbor’s, and see where his own was lacking. And there was another part of him, a voice that was _supposed_ to be quiet, but that Elrond was having an increasingly difficult time remembering _why_ it should be quiet, that was whispering that even if Celebrimbor occasionally pressed too hard with words, he wasn’t likely to reach out and touch Elrond’s hand if he had so abruptly, so noticeably, drawn it away, and that after Celebrimbor himself had provoked the reaction.

He should want that rather less than he wanted the feeling to return to his hand, should want that _considerably_ less than he wanted for his hand to become _useful_ to him once more. In this moment, still shaking off sleep, Elrond was uncertain just what it was that he wanted more.

“Numb,” he muttered, unable to find the wherewithal to prevaricate, let alone formulate some answer that would have had the slightest hope of shaking Celebrimbor off. “There’s…” Elrond stared down at his hand, white-lipped, struggling to withhold another scream that had suddenly risen up in his chest. “There’s no feeling in it at all.”

It had been hours. Elrond did not know just how long it was he had been sleeping before he finally awoke, but he knew that it had to have been hours since he first felt that terrible, numbing cold creeping up his arm. It was no longer the entirety of his forearm that was numb, but his hand felt just as numb as it had been when he had struggled to put his dagger back in its sheath. There was no relief to it, no lessening, no sign that he would _ever_ regain any of the feeling in his hand. Elrond cursed at himself for his impulsiveness. The ghost would not have let go of Celebrimbor without being forced, or at least he didn’t _think_ it wouldn’t, but Elrond could have found some other way, surely. Surely he did not have to bring himself into _such_ close proximity with the unveiled, undiluted fire of an Edhel’s spirit.

(How Celebrimbor had managed to come away from the encounter without his entire body completely numbed, Elrond had no idea. What it was that had actually been happening to him while the ghost had latched onto him, Elrond _still_ had no idea, and intended to find out, if he could find any way to induce Celebrimbor to tell him.)

Elrond stared down at his hand with helpless fury. When, _when_ would his hand be back to normal? When was it that he would be able to handle a pen or a spoon or a knife with the same deftness that he had enjoyed before? Would he have the full use of his hand back before the end of his stay on Tol Himling, or would he be fumbling his way back down the darkness of the bowels of the hill with only one fully-working hand? Would Elrond _ever_ have the full use of his hand back?

He thought that that strain of thought would be returning to take up residence in his mind often, for as long as his hand was yet even slightly numb. Elrond was right-handed. He _thought_ that perhaps he could learn to write with his left hand, in time, though he would be shocked if he ever possessed the mastery with his left hand that he had had with his right, but that wasn’t really the _point_ , now was it? The point was that his hand had been hurt by something largely outside of his understanding, and he had no idea if it would heal on its own, and if it did not heal on its own, he had no idea who he could go to to find healing, and if they would even be able to do anything for him at all.

This could just be… could just be his life, now. It had only been a few hours; Elrond knew that. He hadn’t given it enough time to see if it would go away on its own; he knew that, as well. But he could not keep the thoughts from creeping in, no matter what he did. It was the same as with water: you could make the walls as sturdy as you liked, you could put as much mortar in the cracks as you liked, and water would still find its way in, if it had even the slightest desire to do so. Such was the same with his own anxious thoughts. They always found a way in, no matter what walls he might put up to keep them out. After a certain point, he stopped bothering with _trying_ to keep them out. When nothing he did helped, the attempts just served to exhaust him.

This could just be his life, now. One impulsive mistake, and Elrond lost the use of his right hand forever. If, by some chance, he was to die and then eventually find himself with a body again in Valinor, would that new body have two working hands, or would the numbness in his right follow him even there? How was he supposed to go to the breaking of the world with just one working hand?

Elrond ground his teeth, beating down another scream, this one a little more insistent than the last scream he had had beaten back down into his throat. There were others who simply had to live with such impairments. He knew that. He had known _them_. They had learned, and when he thought of it rationally, it was ridiculous to assume that he would not learn as well.

It was ridiculous.

He was being ridiculous.

He could not stop being ridiculous. He could not shove the thoughts out of his head into the nothingness where rejected thoughts went.

“Are there any breaks in the skin?” Celebrimbor suggested. There… there was concern in his voice. Elrond could not deny that. The concern was not a reflection of what fulminated inside of him, was not a perfect reflection of the tempest, instead being more like what the tempest would be like after it had rained itself out and what was left behind was gray clouds and drizzle. The concern was perhaps more proportionate to the actual level of peril in this situation, and to listen to it, Elrond felt fizzling inside of him a toxic mixture of irritation and embarrassment. “Is there any swelling, or discoloration of your skin?”

Still refusing to meet Celebrimbor’s gaze, “No.” Elrond did not need to look at the hand to know that. He’d seen it bathed in blue light already, looking just as did his left hand, except that he could feel his left hand attached to the end of his arm, and this hand might as well not have been there at all.

(If this was to be his life from now on, or if it wasn’t, and it just took a few years for things to return to normal, for things to become as they _should_ be, Elrond… He was not looking forward to his return to Lindon, if that was the case. He would only be able to hide what had happened to his hand for as long as it took for someone to call upon him to write something down in their presence. Oh, Elrond could take his meals in private as often as he liked, but he did have _work_ to do in the royal court, and that work required that his dominant hand, the hand he _wrote_ with, be a hand that he could actually use.

It would draw notice. Elrond could not expect it not to. He was, after all, a figure that many people in the royal court chose to pay attention to. _Gil-galad_ would notice it, certainly, and probably notice it sooner than anyone else in the court. Gil-galad would want an explanation, if Elrond returned to him with something wrong with one of his hands. When Elrond told him what had happened…

Elrond could forget about being allowed to travel more often, if he returned to the royal court with his right hand completely inoperative. He could just _forget_ about ever being given any assignments that would take him any further from the capital than where he sat right now. Elrond supposed he might well be lucky if he was ever allowed to take an assignment that would take him out of the capital, ever again, and if he was, he might count himself _exceptionally_ lucky to be allowed to leave the capital without also leaving under heavy guard.

If Elrond returned to the capital with his hand still numb, he might no longer have for himself the reputation of the kidnapped child, but he wasn’t certain that he’d like his new reputation—the reckless idiot who injured himself by drawing a dagger without thinking through the consequences of actually using it—any better. At least with the reputation of the kidnapped child, his alleged haplessness was the result of something that had been done to him, rather than because of something _he_ had done.)

“…Elrond…” The unease now shifting at the back of Celebrimbor’s voice was not enough to make Elrond lift his gaze to Celebrimbor’s face, though it did have him staring intently at Celebrimbor’s left hand, pressed flat against his own damp bedding. “The fire of an Edhel’s spirit is… Well, it is not a _typical_ material. I cannot tell you what the normal sequence of events would be, here. I would just counsel patience. I do not believe that the spirit possessed the power to do any permanent damage to your body. Edhil lose most of their power when they leave their bodies behind them; I doubt it could do anything to you that you would bear the marks of forever.”

Elrond would like to believe that. He really, _really_ would. He did not want to bear the marks of it forever. He did not want to stare down at his useless right hand year after year until he either found his way to the Houses of the Dead or he found himself standing in Arda Remade, and be reminded of his random encounter with a random ghost, and to constantly be reminded of the far-reaching consequences of his own impulsiveness. He thought that having to go a few days without the use of his right hand would be enough for the lesson to sink in on its own, thank you very much.

He wanted to believe that. Comfort had rarely been an _actual_ comfort to him, but if he could accept it now, he would have liked to have been able to.

He would have liked to accept it.

But he couldn’t even _feel_ it when he dug the fingernails of his left hand into his right. Elrond watched as red marks formed around the edges of his fingernails. He knew logically that if he dug in not even too much more, he’d see beads of blood bloom around the edges of his fingernails, and he could not feel it at all.

Elrond sucked in a deep breath, and shook his head. “I bear enough marks of enough things upon me, Celebrimbor. I bear enough marks that I will carry with me until I bear a body that never knew them. Why should this be different?”

In return, Celebrimbor sighed heavily, and did not answer.

As Elrond lied back down on his side, stretching his right arm out so that his hand touched no other part of his body, so that he could at least _see_ it and if he woke up again during the night and didn’t remember in the first moments that his hand was numb, he would be able to see it immediately and connect that it was at least _there_ , he winced as those sore muscles began howling anew. Oh, yes, Elrond was definitely going to be feeling this come the morning, though if his right hand was feeling it, too, he thought he might have been able to ignore the full body aches entirely. _I would rather have a nice, soft bed, though. A feather mattress I could sink into, dry blankets that wouldn’t cling to my skin like they’d been slathered in honey or glue, a window that the moonlight could shine through. A town that had no ghosts in it would be nice, too._

He wondered when the ghosts had first begun to congregate in the town surrounding this castle. The sinking of Beleriand certainly worked as a start date—it had been years since the Rodyn had drowned the land, and still, no one had been able to get even a tentative estimate on just how many Edhil had been killed in that drowning. Elrond did not know how many Edhil would have been wandering around Himring when the Sea rushed in, but given that this was one of the very few points of Beleriand high enough to avoid being completely submerged, it was possible that they had all just decided to make their way across the seabed to somewhere that had once been home to their kin, close or distant, and cling to the stones the way Elrond clung to those memories that felt most like the edges of serrated knives.

Maybe after the Nirnaeth, though. The Nirnaeth had been when Himring was abandoned, after all, and as far as Elrond knew, the Orcs had never even tried to occupy the fortress. Perhaps he had finally learned _why_. Perhaps the ghosts could do more to Orcs than they could to Edhil. Perhaps they were simply _inclined_ to do more to Orcs.

Elrond had no feeling in his right hand, and thus, he did not feel it when Celebrimbor’s own hand, still very much in proper working order, curled around it. Elrond was rather too absorbed in his own thoughts to notice. Why notice such things when you could be consumed by your own thoughts, after all?

His arm lifting up, though, _that_ , he noticed. Elrond tilted his head a little to see Celebrimbor rubbing his thumb across the unfeeling knuckles, long, slow, rhythmic movements that Elrond would have given anything to feel shooting up his arm. “Your skin is warm, at least,” Celebrimbor murmured. “Cold, and I would have thought some sort of frostbite, but your skin is warm, and I can feel your pulse just fine. Whatever it is that is wrong, it has nothing to do with your own body.”

A jittery scoff rattled around in Elrond’s mouth. “Wonderful. Shall we go out and track down the ghost that did this, and demand he undo whatever spell he was weaving over us both?”

Celebrimbor rolled his eyes. “I don’t think _that_ would do us much good, Elrond. I don’t think they…” His brow knit, and he frowned deeply, eyes glazing over slightly. “I don’t think that _they_ think the same way that we do. Not anymore. I think that’s rather beyond them, now.”

What had Celebrimbor seen when the ghost grabbed hold of his arm, for him to speak of it with such surety? That was a question. That was a question that Elrond would have liked to have an answer for. But a different strain of thought rose to the front of his mind, whispering _not now_ , counseling that he would not like to hear it in the dark, would not like to hear it when he was still searching for sleep that would not torment. Would he not rather hear such things in the daylight, when they had less power to do harm?

Elrond did not know. He really did not know. He could not find the will to force the words out his mouth, not now.

Beside him, Celebrimbor clicked his tongue. Suddenly, he lifted Elrond’s hand up to his lips, brushing a kiss against his knuckles. “Good night,” he said quietly. “Whatever it is that’s wrong, I hope that by the morning, you’ll find it’s resolved itself.”

Tongue thoroughly tied, Elrond could only nod, drawing his hand back to himself, out of Celebrimbor’s slackening grip. His stomach fluttered as if he’d swallowed a whole swarm of butterflies. His last thought as he drifted off to sleep was an aggravated wish that he could have felt it, instead of having to guess what Celebrimbor’s lips had felt like against his skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Calaquendi** —“Elves of the Light”; the Elves who came to Aman from Cuiviénen, or were born there, especially those born during the Years of the Trees and had born witness to their light; the Vanyar, the Ñoldor, and the Falmari (singular: Calaquendë) (Quenya)  
>  **Edhel** —Elf (plural: Edhil) (Sindarin)  
>  **Edhil** —Elves (singular: Edhel) (Sindarin)  
>  **Ithil** —the Sindarin name for the Moon; of the Sun and the Moon, it is the elder of the two vessels, lit by Telperion’s last flower; in an early version of ‘Of the Sun and Moon and the Hiding of Valinor’ was said to be “the giver of visions” (The Lost Road 264). As this form is very similar to ‘Isil’, the Quenya form (which is likely to be its original form, as the vessel of the Moon was made in Aman), it is likely that ‘Ithil’ was adapted from ‘Isil’; all I can suppose is that the Valar got in contact with Melian at some point during the First Age to share information.  
>  **Laegrim** —the Green-Elves of Ossiriand (singular: Laegel) (plural: Laegil; Laegrim is class-plural term); the division of the Nandor who followed Denethor, son of Lenwë; the name was imposed upon them by the Sindar, because of the lush forests of their land, because of their especial love for the forests and waters of their land, and because the Laegrim often dressed in green as camouflage  
>  **Rodyn** —Valar (singular: Rodon) (Sindarin): a common Sindarin name for the Valar


	15. Chapter Fifteen

Morning did eventually dawn, though as Elrond had predicted, he himself had had absolutely no conception of just when Anor had chosen to peek her head past the Gates of Morning. Instead, he woke to Celebrimbor’s hand jostling his shoulder, woke to a voice close to his ear telling him that it was morning. How _Celebrimbor_ had known that, Elrond had no idea, and he could only suppose that Celebrimbor had discovered it by sheer chance. Whatever the reason, he had been awoken before half the day had come and gone. There was that, at least.

Elrond’s dreams upon returning to sleep had been… Whatever combination of factors that had kept them at bay on the road to the port, after being woken from them just once, was plainly not present here. He had drifted back off to sleep, and his dreams had had no trouble finding him. The less said of their contents, the better. Elrond had never been fond enough of blood to wish to dwell on it.

He had changed into fresh clothes (though how fresh they could be, when he’d been alternating for the duration of the trip, was decidedly questionable), tried to do _something_ with his hair that he had a feeling would have gone a lot better with the addition of oil and maybe, in extremity (Elrond was not his great-grandmother; his hair was not magical and he had no desire to be parted from it), a pair of scissors, made a smaller bag with the supplies he would need for the day, tried to ignore the discontented rumbling of his empty stomach, and followed Celebrimbor up to the surface through one of the other doorways leading out of the kitchen.

His hand was still numb. It was hardly as if he could have failed to notice, considering just how badly only having the use of one of his hands had complicated _everything_ Elrond had set out to do this morning, and oh, if this was how it was to be before he had even left his own makeshift sleeping quarters, the day was going to be a very long one, indeed. _Can I even do_ any _of what I came here to do without the use of my right hand?_

It was not the sort of question he could avoid. Perhaps, in time, Elrond could have learned to write with his left hand, could have learned to adjust to only having the use of one of his hands. But if the need to do such things truly arose, the little over two days he had left on Tol Himling _certainly_ weren’t enough time for either to be accomplished. Elrond had an assignment, one he fully intended to carry out, and as it stood, the information he had gathered was not enough, not _nearly_ enough, for him to call his duties done, without a tone of the deepest derision.

There was… Elrond stared intently at Celebrimbor’s back, as they neared the end of the passageway Celebrimbor was leading him through. There was something. But not yet. He couldn’t work himself up to it, not just yet.

Celebrimbor pushed on the rotting remains of a door considerably less intact than the one he had led Elrond to the night before—either this one was more exposed to the elements, there was some vital difference in the materials or the construction, or it was just down to random chance—and the surprisingly chill air of morning hit Elrond’s face, cool and damp and smelling of the indescribable not-scent of freshwater.

The not-scent of freshwater might have derived its source at least somewhat from the fact that, as Elrond’s ears had failed to alert him until he was out the door himself, it was still raining.

The door opened on a veranda of crumbling stone that overlooked a small courtyard. Through the tangles of tall, wiry grass and dense, foreboding patches of gorse bush, Elrond could make out the remains of what he thought had once been a fountain. Or was still a fountain; Elrond wasn’t really an expert on when a fountain ceased to be a fountain, and was in no mood this morning to start making the efforts towards becoming one. It was not the easiest thing in the world to make out just how the sculpture in the center of the fountain had been shaped; in addition to all the grass and gorse, deep green ivy was growing rampantly over the stained white stone of the fountain, obscuring it almost completely. Elrond thought it might have been a horse leaping up towards the sky; the shape of the protrusions towards the top of the structure was certainly suggestive of a horse’s front legs. If it was a horse, its head had been knocked off at some point after the abandonment of the fortress. Elrond could see no sign of it.

The fountain in the ruined courtyard was certainly an item of interest. It would have been much _more_ enticing as an item of interest if not for the sheets of silver rain falling steadily from the edge of the veranda onto the ground, if not for the sheets of rain falling only slightly less steadily directly from the sky onto the thicket that time and neglect had made of the courtyard.

It wasn’t storming, as it had been last night. Elrond _liked_ to think that, if it had still been raining, if the sky had still been booming with thunder, if there was now lightning to be had as well, he would have noticed it before now. He would have felt the reverberations on the stone, would have _heard_ it as they drew closer to the doorway. _Surely_ he would have heard one of the tremendous cracks of thunder that had boomed over their heads last night long before he was standing in the outside himself.

He should have heard the rain before reaching the door, as well. There was a whole panel missing out of that door; you would think that the sound of rain, especially steady rain like this, even if it was no longer a torrential downpour, would have reached his ears before he reached the point where he was looking at it with his own eyes. Elrond had slept poorly the night before. He had only awoken a few minutes before. He’d not eaten what was supposed to pass for his breakfast yet. That was all the excuse he could tender.

“Lovely day,” Elrond muttered, grimacing Celebrimbor’s way.

It had not been meant as any sort of accusation, not meant as a jibe or an attempt to cut. Elrond had _hoped_ for some sort of commiseration—what he was really hoping for was that the commiseration would lessen the misery of such a gray and dreary morning, made only more miserable by the fact that Elrond was going to be eating his pitiful excuse for a breakfast with just one hand—and had hoped for, perhaps…

He could not say what he had hoped for. He was not really certain of it.

What he had gotten instead was Celebrimbor shrugging diffidently, and sitting down on a patch of brick pathway under the roof of the veranda so that he could eat his breakfast in the dry, never giving Elrond an answer that he cared to put into words. Elrond stared down at the top of Celebrimbor’s head, so intently that after a few moments he expected to see Celebrimbor’s dark hair begin to smoke, but no matter how he stared, Celebrimbor never acknowledged it, just kept on eating his dry sausage and his pickled egg without ever making a single comment on the quality of the food, or the fact that Elrond had no sat down and started to eat his food as well.

Elrond sucked in a deep breath. He’d… Actually, given the excitement of last evening and the early parts of the night, he had managed to forget just how Celebrimbor had been acting before the storm had come upon them. He had managed to forget the malaise that had settled upon Celebrimbor, the way he seemed to sink into himself and show no sign of wanting to come out for anything but being told that it was time to leave (And that, only if Elrond was guessing correctly. If not… If not, Elrond wondered just what it would take to bring Celebrimbor out of this state, if leaving the island wasn’t enough by itself). Had he been thinking about it, perhaps Elrond would have thought that his encounter with the ghost had been enough to jar him out of it permanently, but as it was, he had not been thinking about it, and Celebrimbor’s encounter with the ghost, whatever it was that the ghost had been doing to him, had not been enough to permanently jar the man out of the state he had been occupying before the storm had come down on Tol Himling and they had discovered that the town was home to the restless dead.

He wished he knew what to do about it. He thought he knew what he could _say_ about it, but even though he’d resolved to start pressing (on all points, he’d meant to do it on all points) once sunlight shone down upon him, morning had come, and Elrond was not nearly as motivated as he would have needed to be. He could claim that it was because sunlight was _not_ shining down upon him, because Anor’s face was hidden entirely by pewter clouds and it might as well have been twilight, but that would have just been an excuse. Elrond did not know why he could not yet find it in him to have the conversation, only that he could not.

As long as he could reasonably claim that his time was occupied with his duties, Elrond supposed that he could be excused. So long as he was devoted to the fulfillment of his duties, to the paving of the path of his future, to the forging of a new reputation for himself, Elrond supposed that he could excuse his inability to have the conversation. (Whenever it came, Elrond knew that the moment would not likely not be one that he looked back upon with any fondness, once he was away from the site of the conversation, once he was away from the island, once he was back in a place where he had more company than just Celebrimbor—even if Celebrimbor had been, for the most part, far from unpleasant company. When it came to serious conversations, Elrond rarely looked back upon any of them with any fondness. They usually heralded a separation. Elrond had learned very early on to despise separation.) He did not have to do it right at this very moment. So long as he was working, he did not have to do it at this very moment.

Whether or not he could work properly, under the present circumstances, that was another question entirely.

Elrond ran through his poor excuse for a breakfast quickly enough. After the night he’d had, he _was_ hungry, even if he was hungry for something that was actual food and not the travel rations that only the truly desperate would have ever been happy to eat. (Celebrimbor had always eaten them with perfect contentment. It _did_ occur to Elrond to wonder just what that said about him, though he thought that it might be more appropriate as fodder for teasing at some point in the distant future, once they were both back in the capital and the specter of having to eat travel rations at every meal for days and days on end was little more than the shadow of a nightmare, than it was for the topic of a _serious_ conversation here on the island, while they were still eating those dratted travel rations at every meal, the only relief a thicket of blackberry bushes with unripe blackberries that they had to walk a fair distance through a town that was a haven for the dead after dark to get to.) He was hungry, and if the food was less than palatable, well—the sooner Elrond ate all of the food, the sooner he wouldn’t have to entertain that food on his tongue any longer, or crush it between his teeth, or smell it, or have to _look_ at it. He’d gotten through many an unpalatable meal in his time that way. It was a simple solution, but one that had always worked well enough for him.

Now, where were they to go today?

Elrond was not certain that going about things the way they had the day before was really the best way to go. He had taken a preliminary inventory of some of the normal chambers you would expect from any castle manned by Edhil anywhere in Ennor. It was remarkable that so many of those objects were still there, still intact after so much time, but you could find many of them in the castle in the capital, could likely find many of them in Duileth’s new residence in the far east of the world as well. Elrond needed to find something truly eye-catching, if he wanted his report to stand out, or if he wanted Gil-galad to be convinced that future expeditions to the island would be not only warranted, but _desirable_.

There was the obvious snag…

“Do you think I should bring up the ghosts when I make my report?” Elrond asked suddenly, looking appealingly to Celebrimbor and hoping that he would be able to rouse himself long enough to actually give Elrond a meaningful reply.

And indeed, this did get Elrond a response ( _If I have to bring up the ghosts every single time I want him to react more strongly than with a shrug and a grimace, I’m not certain I can handle that_ ). Celebrimbor paused in his present task, folding up the cloth his breakfast had been wrapped up, to fix Elrond in a long stare, eyebrow raised. “What I think you should be asking yourself is how _you_ think that Ereinion would take it, if he sent work crews here to shift the castle’s valuables, only for all of them to come back empty-handed and weeping because they unexpectedly came across a town full of houseless spirits, when he knew quite well that there was a way that he could have warned the work crews of what they were likely to find here, but he was never given that tool to utilize?”

Quite the question to ask. There was only one answer Elrond could take away from it, and it was honestly enough to put him off the rest of his breakfast (which would not normally be anything remarkable with travel rations, but considering how hungry he had been when he woke up, it was something he could not help but mark on this morning); it was almost enough to put him off of his _lunch_.

“He’d be…” Elrond swallowed hard, his suddenly dry throat creaking at the harsh movement. “He’d be quite miffed.”

“Indeed,” Celebrimbor agreed, eyebrow pitching ever closer towards his hairline. “I’d leave the ghosts in, if I were you.”

Wonderful. Between what had happened to Elrond’s hand, the state of disrepair the fortress was in, and the fact that the town absolutely _teemed_ with the restless dead after dark, Elrond would be lucky if he’d be able to do _anything_ with this report that wasn’t giving it to Gil-galad and then pretending he had never written it at all. It would have been different if he could have claimed he’d put up some heroic fight against the ghosts, but as it stood…

_Worry about that when you’re back in the capital. Just focus on your duties right now. Just take it all one thing at a time._

Easy enough to say, or think. But when the thoughts came creeping in, when the worries came knocking on the door of his mind, Elrond would see just how well he was able to ignore them. He’d see if he was able to ignore them at all.

“We don’t have time to explore the fortress fully, do we?” Elrond asked, once he had put away the cloth wrapping of his ‘breakfast.’ It seemed as good a point to start at as any.

Celebrimbor shook his head, murmuring, “We would need twice the time and three times the men. For a start.”

And coming from someone who knew the fortress as well as anyone likely to still be living—even out here on this island, Elrond occasionally caught himself listening for a song that was in no way the Sea’s; the only consolation he had for himself was that, once he reminded himself that it was an _island_ , it was easier to stop himself than it would have been, say, at the port—Elrond saw no reason not to take Celebrimbor’s word for it. He sighed. If he had somehow managed to give Gil-galad a report that dealt with _all_ of the contents of Himring Castle, that would no doubt have been more impressive. A _lot_ more impressive.

_But will it not whet the appetite of curiosity, to be presented with something yet a mystery, but with an enticing veneer?_

There were plenty of people for whom Tol Himling and the fortress perched atop it was never going to appeal. Elrond was not speaking of those who would be turned away by the prospect of ghosts. If anything, Elrond could think of a few young hotheads (yes, he _had_ looked in a mirror before leaving; thank you for asking) at court who would have considered the threat of the ghosts an added bonus of the excitement of going on such a trip, to such a place. When Elrond thought about those who could be convinced and those who could not be convinced, the ghosts honestly did not enter into his considerations very much.

As to those who were never going to wish to come here, no matter what Elrond said or wrote or did, be it on account of undying antipathy or a need to obscure their own past as much as possible or just because the emotions the fortress excited were unbearable, Elrond was not going to waste his time trying to convince them to think otherwise. They had already made up their minds, and honestly, when Elrond listened to Men complain of the unending stubbornness of Elves, he could hardly disagree with them. The one thing the Edhil, Calaquendi and Úmanyar, Exiles and Sindar, Falathrim and Laegrim and Avari, all had in common, was that they were an obnoxiously obstinate lot. Elrond could prove himself a shining example in a heartbeat, if he had sufficient cause, and that knowledge taught him well the futility of trying to budge those who could not be budged.

But Elrond knew that there were others who could be moved, if he found the right words with which to move them. Gil-galad would never have made the assignment available in the first place if he believed there to be no merit in coming to this place and carrying its secrets home. Círdan wouldn’t forbid any of his mariners to come here; _Círdan_ had never stood in the way of the acquisition of greater knowledge, not in Elrond’s memory. Galadriel had not spoken out against it, and though she had otherwise been inscrutable on the matter, Galadriel had never been in Elrond’s experience someone who would hesitate to speak her mind and speak it true.

There were others in the court, mostly Exiles, mostly Gondolindrim, who had voiced a desire to mine the past of their people, wherever there were sites left to mine, for knowledge that could make their lives in this Second Age of Anor something kinder and gentler and wiser than they would otherwise have been. Elrond _did_ have an audience for this; he knew it. He just had to find the right angle to approach from.

_Appeal to them with the glitter of gold, if there is any gold left to glitter. That is the surest way._

“Had Himring any treasure vaults?”

That was a foolish question. To ask it made Elrond feel like a child again, a child who had glimpsed one piece of treasure only, and had forever been unable to make fair comparisons as a result. (The Silmaril, whatever else it was—and it had been quite a _lot_ of things—made all other treasures pale before it.) All castles of the Edhil had treasure vaults, even if they were mean and sparse compared to the greatest of them. After all, the Edhil could live unto the breaking of the world, if grief or injury or infection did not assail them, and even those Edhil who had little wealth to start with could accrue a fair amount of treasure in the time it took for the breaking of the world to come upon them.

You could only have so much treasure out in the hallways and sitting up on display before it started to get gaudy. Actually, forget gaudy; it quickly got _tacky_ , and if we were wanting to get just a little more serious about it, having all of your treasure out on display would quickly make your home a prime target for thieves. In any castle in Ennor, there was always going to be those pieces of treasure that sat out, and those pieces of treasure that were shut away in the vault. There were always going to be the trinkets that the lord of the castle thought too ugly to be put anywhere but away in a vault where they would not have to look at them. There were always going to be those pieces, gifts from the lords of neighboring territories or gifts from the lords of _distant_ territories, pieces of treasure meant to seal alliances, that could not be kept out for the scandal that would have been provoked if they were ever lost or stolen—however beautiful they were, however fond the lord of the castle might have been of them, it was much better if they were just kept away somewhere safe, somewhere thieves could not get at them. There would inevitably come the times when the lord of the castle grew bored of the décor and they wished to switch some things out. There were treasures that were only appropriate to have out, decorating the castle, at certain times of the year. There were treasures that were only appropriate to bring out to serve as decorations at certain feasts or other celebrations. There were certain weapons, the swords and lances and axes, weapons with fabulously jeweled and filigreed hilts and pommels; they were battle-worthy, certainly, but few people would take such weapons out onto the battlefield with them, and they could not just sit in an armory, now could they? If the lord of the castle was not inclined to hang it up in their own personal quarters, or if there was nowhere to _put_ it in their personal quarters, into the treasure vaults it went.

Maedhros had been the head of his house in Ennor. Perhaps his house had always had a tarnished reputation in Ennor, even before he and his raised their swords against Doriath, but they had still been a house of princes among the Ñoldor, and Maedhros had been well-respected by everyone outside of Doriath in Ennor, once. He’d been _rich_ , too, so even if he hadn’t been receiving too many gifts of treasure from friends and allies, he would have had the resources to produce plenty of his own. Even if all of the treasures the Fëanorians had brought with them from Valinor had been dragged to the bottom of the Sea by angry Maiar, there would still have been ample opportunity to fill up the treasure vaults of Himring Castle.

Elrond had… You know, in all this time, he’d not devoted _that_ much time to contemplating what the treasure vaults of Himring Castle would contain, if they yet contained anything at all. He _had_ come here hoping to find some sort of treasure, something he could write about and impress everyone with. But he had not thought too much about the _specifics_ of that treasure. Maedhros had never been someone he could ever connect to treasure. The noble lord of Himring, perhaps, could have vaults full of treasure in this adamantine fortress, but _Maedhros_ , ragged Maedhros, he was not someone Elrond could ever imagine as lord over a vast hoard of treasure. It did not make sense.

It had not made much sense to him, and thus, Elrond had not devoted much time to contemplation of it. But he was sitting in the fortress now. He’d seen more than enough hints of its former splendor to see what his mind had had such trouble reconciling. This had been a rich place once. There was no reason to assume that, any differently from the other castles of the Edhil, that this one would not contain treasure. Unless the Edhil fleeing the castle during the Nirnaeth had decided to take it with them, or looters had since come here and left no other sign of their presence that could survive the ravages of time, there was no reason to assume that that treasure was not still here.

Anyone reading Elrond’s report would expect to hear of this treasure. Even if what they heard was that the treasure vaults had been looted and there was no more treasure to be found, they would expect to hear _something_. So yes, Elrond would have to have a look at the treasure vaults.

Now that the moment had arrived, it seemed less exciting than Elrond would have thought, when he first set out here. Perhaps that had something to do with the way that looking through the treasure vaults felt more than a little like _looting_ them, even if Elrond intended only to carry off the smallest pieces, if there were any small pieces to be found, even if the lord of the castle was dead as dust and the only man who could feasibly have been called his heir was here with him, and had voiced no objection to the idea of Elrond taking things away from the castle with him. He could not shake off the feeling that it would be wrong, no matter how suddenly the feeling had come down upon him. He felt as if—

But that was ridiculous. Maedhros was, after all, dead as dust. Elrond let out a shaky sigh, rubbing his numb right hand with his left, trying desperately and in vain to chafe some feeling back into the insensate flesh. Maedhros was dead as dust, and whatever he might think of Elrond’s presence here likely mattered not at all to the Doomsman or his Maiar attendants, in the Houses of the Dead where he must now reside.

Celebrimbor nodded. “A few.”

A terse response, far terser than Elrond thought he would have received had they been speaking to each other in the capital, had Elrond been asking him of something that was not this fortress on this island.

(When had he ever had such a conversation with Celebrimbor in the capital? Elrond could not remember such a time. He had always avoided Celebrimbor in the capital, always avoided any situation that could have seen them speaking with one another as best he could. There was nothing wrong with his memory; he remembered perfectly well why it was that he had given Celebrimbor such a wide berth. It was…

Why had his feelings changed, all of a sudden? Why was it that he now looked upon his former avoidance with something that felt almost like regret? Elrond could not imagine that having the words or the feelings drawn out of him would have hurt any less. He could not imagine that it would have felt any less like having the tissue ripped off of a scar and clumsily curious fingers, uncaring of the harm they caused, plunged into the old-new wounds. And yet, now it felt like something that should be courted, instead of avoided. It felt like something that would have been… Cathartic? Elating? Elrond could not say. The idea of it filled him with a sick, giddy something that he could not name. Whether he would even be able to pick himself up after it was done, or if he would just lie on the floor in a hundred pieces, Elrond could not say.)

It was a terse response, but it was a response that told him what he needed to know. What was more, it was a response that gave him what he wanted—at least, it was a response that gave him what he wanted in the service of writing up a report that would have convinced Gil-galad to send subsequent expeditions to the island. Now, he just had to press a little further, and he would be there.

“Can you take me there?” Elrond asked him, gentling his voice as much as he could. It occurred to him that the tone he was taking with Celebrimbor was not entirely dissimilar to the tone he might have taken with a hurt child or a spooked animal. It occurred to him that Celebrimbor might take offense to this tone, if he both took notice of it, and grasped what it meant. In all of that, it never then occurred to Elrond that Celebrimbor might take such offense to it that he might refuse altogether to lead Elrond to the treasure vaults of the castle.

Letting out a breath too quiet to really be termed a sigh, Celebrimbor rose to his feet, shifting his bag across his shoulders, so that it would sit evenly on the center of his back. “It will take a little time for us to reach them. If you want to see them, you should follow me.”

And really, Elrond would not have needed to worry. He’d not known Celebrimbor to engage in such petty displays of temper. Such things were for other members of the court, not for him. But the sheer lack of reaction…

He would not have thought that of Celebrimbor, either. However mild-mannered the man might be, every man had his pride, and Elrond had known few who would not have taken umbrage at being treated like a child without any real cause. He would have expected a reaction. He _did_ expect a reaction. And yet, nothing. Just this rote reaction, devoid of any emotion.

While Elrond was pondering, while Elrond was finding a fair amount in his pondering to put a pensive, worried frown on his face, Celebrimbor was standing just a couple of feet away, waiting for him in patient silence. Elrond thought he would have preferred if Celebrimbor had behaved the way he had down in the kitchen last night. He thought he would have preferred it a great deal to this shell of a man, who showed only the faintest glimmers of anything alive underneath.

Elrond wasn’t certain what to do about it. (That was a lie, or at least, it was part of a lie. Elrond had some idea of what to do about it. At the very least, he had an idea of how to _start_. But he wasn’t certain where to go after he passed beyond the very few steps he had laid down in his mind, and if Celebrimbor’s reaction deviated even slightly from what he expected, those steps would go flying off into the abyss, so he had _one_ step planned out in his head, and once he got past that one step, Elrond wasn’t at all certain of where to go next. But he _did_ have an initial step planned out, and to pretend that he didn’t was self-deception.) For now, he had made a specific request, and if Celebrimbor was going to carry it out willingly, he might as well cooperate with the situation that he himself had engineered.

He needed to take notes about this to make a proper report, didn’t he?

Ginger of his numb hand, Elrond rose to his feet, and followed after Celebrimbor, back into the castle.

-0-0-0-

They really hadn’t gone through too much of the castle the day before. They’d not reached it until the afternoon, so there were only a few hours to explore in before Anor began to sink below the horizon, sinking into the Sea (Elrond wondered sometimes just how unbearably, _blisteringly_ hot the western reaches of Valinor must have become during sunset, if the Rodyn were not intervening in some way to keep the westernmost waters of the Sea from boiling to absolutely nothing whenever Anor sank below the waves). There had only been a few hours of daylight left, then, and Elrond had spent enough time in those first few rooms that Celebrimbor had led him to that he’d really not had much opportunity to explore the ground floor of the castle.

Elrond had seen little of the ground floor of the castle yesterday, and thus, the corridors Celebrimbor led him down were completely foreign to him. They were sheltered from the rain, at least, though that meant that they were windowless and dark and the only light to be had as they traversed them was the eerie blue light of Celebrimbor’s lamp, which…

If Elrond had wished to be transported to the past, he would have said so. If Elrond had been looking to be transported to the past, he would admit that there was no more efficient way to do it that he could think of than this, walking down a dark, narrow corridor, bathed in blue light, led on his way by a tall, dark-haired man with eyes even brighter than the lamp he held in his hands. (There had been… There had been a scar, a little crescent-shaped scar, curling on the left-hand side of the jaw, just below the ear. Elrond had wondered sometimes where it had come from, before he had decided that he was better off not knowing. He had caught himself looking for that scar twice, now; the first time around, there had even been a moment when he was confused by the fact that he couldn’t see it.)

Elrond had never asked to be transported to the past. He would never have asked to be transported to the past, considering that the past was a place where he could do nothing but drown. And on top of that, the corridor was not exactly pleasant to be in on its own.

Given that the corridor _was_ narrow and without windows, the air was decidedly, uncomfortably close. Actually, in the interest of accuracy, Elrond was going to have to admit that, silly as it might sound, he’d begun to feel as if the air had hitched a ride on his back—about five seconds after he entered this corridor, mind. The combination of summer rain and summer heat, even if the latter was considerably tempered by the former, had conspired to render the corridor a humid, sticky purgatory, at some points almost like breathing water itself, though without the more deleterious effects of drowning tacked on.

Elrond wondered how well-ventilated this part of the castle had been while it was still inhabited. The fact that every single window he had thus far come across had been missing all of its glass (and it was just now occurring to Elrond that he had seen far less in the way of glass shards on the ground than he would have expected, under the circumstances—and by ‘far less,’ he meant ‘none at all’) most certainly accounted for much of the moisture in the air in the interior of the castle, but Elrond knew just enough about architecture to know that unless the air around Himring was considerably drier in the days when the fortress had been perched atop a hill, rather than an island, there would have been problems with humidity even when this place was fully intact.

So, what methods were implemented to make the air less close and more easily breathable by those who must traverse the passageway? Elrond would have to wait until he was back in the capital and had access to the royal library once more before he could learn some of the methods by which a castle’s architects could keep humidity at bay. For now, all there was to do was look around him, mark what he saw, and try to mark specially anything that stood out as interesting.

_If ever I have the construction of halls of my own under my supervision, the air within must be cool in summer, warm in winter, and_ always _dry_.

But Elrond would not have long to look about him and try to mark any signs. Almost as soon as he was counseling himself such, Celebrimbor was drawing to a halt before a set of doors, holding his lamp aloft, so that Elrond could see for himself.

These doors were not wood, either intact or rotting, as all of the other doors Elrond had seen thus far had been. Instead, these doors were made of steel.

Oh, Elrond was no expert on metallurgy, and certainly not to the extent that would have allowed him to identify any metal he laid eyes on _just_ by laying eyes on it. Gold was obvious enough, silver scarcely less so—though considering the tapestries in the entrance hall, Elrond was clearly not infallible where silver was concerned. It was more that he had a certainty in his mind, divorced from anything like evidence-gathering. This was steel. It could not possibly have been anything else.

The double doors were each made of steel, and even now, the sternness of their purpose was yet clear. Spotted by piebald flecks of rust they might have been, but Elrond needed to look at them for but a moment to tell that they would not have given in easily to any who did not know the secret of their opening. They had a presence, and their presence spoke of _weight_. They spoke of the toil that had gone into their making, the sweat and muscle aches that had been inspired by their transportation, wherever they had been forged, to this place, where they were to be set into the wall with even _more_ sweat, and possibly some blood and tears spilled along the way as well. They were doors that laughed in the faces of thieves, even if those thieves were strong as Tulkas. They were doors that had likely sometimes laughed in the face of their master, whenever their keys were misplaced.

Elrond was surprised that all of the doors in the castle weren’t like this.

“Is there a password for this door as well?”

Elrond could only assume that there was. Treasure vault doors were not typically left unlocked, as a rule—he could easily imagine Maedhros decreeing that all of the doors in the castle be locked whenever someone entered or left through one of them, _as a rule_ —and he could not imagine that Celebrimbor would have led him here, if it was only so that they could be thwarted by a pair of locked doors.

Well, considering the state Celebrimbor was in at this moment, perhaps it wasn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility that he had forgotten. But he did not think it very likely. And he _did_ think that a treasure vault was one of those places within a castle that would have had a password, one known to the lord of the keep, and a select few others only.

(Had Celebrimbor made any of what Elrond would look upon inside?)

Sure enough, Celebrimbor nodded slightly, though the deep shadows that crept in at the edges of the lamp’s light exaggerated the gesture considerably. There was no insignia upon this door (at least, none that had survived the ravages of rust), no sign of the eight-pointed star that Elrond would have expected to see on such a door in such a castle, and it would have been well over a hundred years since Celebrimbor last had the opportunity to stand before this door, and yet, Celebrimbor clearly knew just what to do. He passed the lamp off to Elrond, and stepped forward.

Drawing closer, holding the lamp up both so that Celebrimbor could see better what he was doing and so that _Elrond_ could get a good look at what he was doing, Elrond peered over Celebrimbor’s shoulder, watching intently as he went about his work. There were no whispered words now, no Quenya incantations intoned in a mutter just too low for Elrond to make out the words. Now, there was tapping, as there had been on the star, but the locations of the tapping were considerably more… random.

_How many times did he have to practice this, in order to memorize it so well that he would remember it perfectly, more than a century down the line?_ Elrond wondered to himself, as he watched Celebrimbor just tap, tap, tap, at various locations on the doors. Alright, granted, it was possible that Celebrimbor did not remember perfectly, and they were both about to stand back and watch as absolutely nothing happened—or worse yet, they would find that whatever traps the castle architects had put in to protect the treasure vaults in the event of an attempted break-in were still functional. Those things could very well happen, but Elrond was _trying_ to be optimistic. The Second Age of Anor was supposed to be an age for optimism. The better not to be left behind in the static shadows of the First Age, Elrond would try to fit in with the second, even if he did not do it naturally, even if he did not always do it particularly _well_.

If there was anything left in the vaults to be found, anything left to be _seen_ , this was where the bulk of the material for his report would come from. Elrond drew a deep breath, trying desperately to steady himself as Celebrimbor tapped on the last few sections of door that needed to be tapped on to activate whatever unlocking mechanism responded to the code. He would go inside, he would see all there was to see, he would see—

Whatever else Elrond was likely to see, he would see something that he would no doubt never be able to reconcile with his memories of he who had once been the owner of all the treasure that was left to look upon in the vaults. He was going to have to start trying to reconcile the two images, one of these days, for the sake of his own personal future, if not for his future as a loremaster. He was going to have to reconcile the two images, however disparate they might be, if he wanted to be able to look back on anything that had happened with the detachment he would need to adopt in order to truly make it something of the past, to make it something that would not dog his steps wherever he went, so that whenever he met someone for the first time, he was left to wonder if they knew what had happened to him when he was a child, if they knew who he had spent so much of his childhood in the company of, left to wonder what they thought of it, wondering if they pitied him or if they were suspicious of him or if there was that derisive condescension of the _kidnapped child_ , that condescension that Elrond could never escape no matter how far away he ran from it, that he—

Part of the process of leaving it in the past would, Elrond supposed, involved getting to the point where he no longer _cared_ what sort of reputation he had to whatever sort of person he was speaking with. In order to leave something behind in the past, he had to be so at peace with it that not only would it no longer dominate his way of thinking, no longer dominate his perceptions of the world, but it would no longer enter into his thoughts unless Elrond deliberately chose for it to do so. He could not be at peace with the past until the past was no longer prowling on the periphery of his conscious, present perceptions, and even the sniggering condescension of those who felt no pity, those who thought his past fodder for their own entertainment, inspired no emotion in him beyond the faintest possible irritation.

How Elrond was supposed to do that, he had no idea. How he was supposed to make his peace with anything, he did not know. Many of those around him, he either suspected or was certain that they had never made their peace with their pasts. He had few examples to look to, and of those, none of those had ever shared their secrets with him.

Celebrimbor was finishing up with the doors, straightening his back slowly, as if he had been saddled earlier with a burden of great weight, or… Actually, perhaps a more apt comparison would come from the Men Elrond had spent time among, especially the older ones, the ones afflicted with arthritis and other ailments that made standing up straight, especially if they were coming from having sat down or crouched down low, a trial in and of itself. It was not something at all natural for an Edhel, especially not one who had never been taken captive by their Enemy and put to work in his mines or any of the other places where Morgoth sought to break Edhil both in body and in mind. It was…

Elrond did not know how to make his peace with anything. He certainly did not know how to make his peace with something like this. He certainly did not think that he _should_ be making his peace with something like this.

Later. Later. When he both had the words he wished to say, and could find in himself the will to say them, could push past the walls of hesitation and inertia and the unwillingness to provoke a fight with his only guide through this place, his only company who was living and not dead for the entire time he was on this land. Later. Not now.

(It did not feel like a concession, so much as it felt like surrender. It was not something he should be surrendering to. But at the same time, he felt as if prodding would have been an invitation for Celebrimbor to prod in return. And as confused as Elrond’s feelings on the point of Celebrimbor’s prodding had lately become, he was still trying to shake off the feeling of hypocrisy that came about when he thought about prodding, considering his own past reactions to Celebrimbor prodding at _him_.)

But now, Celebrimbor was standing straight and tall as he ever did, as if there was no great burden on his back at all. He was not calling for Elrond to return the lamp or help him as he pushed the heavy doors open—perhaps it was deference to Elrond’s numb and useless hand, or perhaps Celebrimbor had presently forgotten that Elrond was with him at all. Elrond certainly knew of how wrapped up _he_ could get in his own reminiscences, when he was falling particularly far back into his own past. There had been occasions when he had forgotten completely that he wasn’t alone. Typically, in such situations, others interacting with him was rarely enough by itself to draw him out. It was Elros’s absence that did the trick in that case, Elrond nearly calling out for his brother, for his opinion or to see where he was, his brother’s name on the tip of his tongue, and realizing abruptly that Elros was nowhere to be found, remembering abruptly that Elros had chosen a different path from him and he had gone far, far away to be king over an island of Men, that put him firmly back in the present. That… was more than it should have taken, honestly. If Celebrimbor had a little trouble perceiving others when he was trapped in the past, Elrond thought he could understand it. If he was falling into the past a little more often here than he would in the capital, Elrond thought he could understand it.

Elrond had already spent enough time speculating on the contents of the treasure vaults of Himring Castle. He wasn’t going to speculate on it again in the moments before he stepped through the doors (opened with no small amount of huffing and puffing on Celebrimbor’s part, and if that wasn’t a result of rust clogging up the hinges, Elrond supposed that here was a second line of defense against thieves: the doors were so difficult to get open that even if thieves managed to force the doors open while there were no guards around to ward them off, it would take them so much time and effort just to _get them_ all the way open that a second wave of guards would no doubt have made their way there by the time the thieves got the doors open wide enough to even get through themselves) of the vault and saw everything for himself. Elrond’s thoughts already ran in enough circles; he didn’t want to add this circle to the array.

No. Now, it was time to see, and to drink in the sights there were to see.

And it was easier to see them than Elrond might have thought. Though the corridor he had walked down to reach this place had been without windows, the vault—vaults, he quickly confirmed for himself; the room was broken off into several different chambers—was not without windows at all. He had stepped into a vast chamber, nearly the size of the entrance hall, with a soaring, multi-domed ceiling that stood just as high, and set high up in the wall, nearly all the way up to the ceiling, there were rows narrow windows through which pale gray light shone through. Perhaps on a sunny day, perhaps on a day when the sky was not clogged with clouds and those clouds were not pouring sheets of silver rain down onto the ground, the chamber would have been more well-lit and Elrond would have been able to see more clearly. Perhaps if all of the sconces mounted to the walls had had lit torches burning in them, he would have been able to see more clearly, to see everything in those dimly-lit, far-off corners. But as it stood, those narrow windows up towards the ceiling let in more light than you would have thought, and Elrond could see more than enough to get a good idea of the contents of the vaults.

Just from his first look, his first impression, Elrond could see that the treasure vaults of Himring had clearly _not_ been looted—at least, if anyone had looted it, the only things they had carried off were tiny little trinkets that would easily be missed by anyone else who came in after these looters had come and gone. There were clearly demarcated paths through all masses and masses of treasure, and it was just as clear that in the time since the treasure vaults were last taken care of by whoever their keepers had been, things were not nearly as orderly as they could have been. Whether that was down to looters or the tremors of the earth or just beams and supports weakening once it had been a few decades since they were last maintained, Elrond did not know. So long as the reason posed no risk to him or to Celebrimbor, Elrond was not certain that it mattered.

The treasure vaults of Himring were still quite full. That mattered quite a bit more.

Elrond sucked a deep breath, and… And yes, he _did_ almost immediately start coughing. The treasure vaults had gone a long time without maintenance, and that meant that they had also gone a long time without a good _dusting_. The air was positively choked with dust motes, and those dust motes were quite eager to choke anyone or anything else that chose to insert itself into the treasure vaults. (Perhaps that was a third line of defense?) That, more than anything else, made Elrond think that if this vault had ever been broken into by looters, they certainly would not have had the opportunity to carry off anything of real _size_. After all, while the treasure of these vaults might be in some amount of disarray, Elrond didn’t see any sign of corpses. Not so much as a single bone from a single thief who’d managed to choke on the dust.

Chests and tables and shelves upon shelves upon shelves. All that glittered in all the world, you could find an example of it here. There was _color_ here, as well, for it appeared that this was where the castle’s tapestries were kept when they were not being displayed, and in this setting, sheltered and reasonably dry and, out of the way of direct sunlight, the tapestries were in considerably better condition than the ones in the entrance hall—their colors weren’t faded, they weren’t frayed in any way, and as best as Elrond could tell, they had not begun to mold. At least, Elrond could not _smell_ any mold coming from the direction of the pile of tapestries in that one corner.

It was striking, how intact this room was, compared to every other room Elrond had been in in this castle. For a moment, that realization managed to dull the glitter of the vaults considerably. This had been a place where people had lived, where _many_ people had lived, and if anything deserved to be indelible upon the stones of the castle, if was the lives of those people who had called this place home. If the castle should be marked by anything, it should be marked by every last echo of the residents’ lives. They should be inescapable; they should be so overpowering as to be the only real topic of interest that Elrond could cover in his report.

The echoes of the lives of the dead Edhil (mostly dead, anyways, and if there were those who yet lived, Elrond would never find them, for they would never willingly identify themselves) should overpower every last inch of this place. The ghosts should be nothing before the echoes; the ghosts should flee in the face of them. And yet, where Elrond expected echoes, there was only silence. So many people had lived their lives here for centuries, and the evidence of their lives had been so thoroughly obliterated that not even the faintest echoes remained.

Instead, there were these rooms of treasure. Beautiful treasures they were, and yet, they were sterile. They had none of the lively, crackling messiness of the life of an Edhel. They had a definite beginning and a definite end, and were confined neatly to those bounds, never deviating from the path their purpose had set out for them. They were beautiful, and goodly, and dead.

But they did not have the noisome stench of corpses, and so, Elrond would look them over, would catalogue a selection of them so that their presence here might entice those among the royal court who could be swayed by such enticements, and perhaps if he found something suitable for transportation, he would bring it back to the capital with him to serve as a prop, for all the wonders of Himring Castle.

(Suddenly, he was wondering if it was all so wondrous, after all. These vaults would no doubt be wondrous to nearly anyone else who laid eyes on them, but he who had forever been spoiled by proximity to one of the Silmarils could look past the glitter in the space of a moment and see the— But he had dwelled upon it more than enough, and now, it was time to do what he had set out to do.)

Handing Celebrimbor back his lamp, but otherwise paying the man little mind, Elrond strode over to a nearby table on which was strewn several items of jewelry, deciding that this was as good a place to start as any—after all, those who would be reading his report looking for signs of treasure were also the sort of people who liked best the sort of treasure that they could wear upon their own bodies, flaunting them to those who did not possess them. (Granted, Elrond could not imagine either Oropher nor Thranduil ever willingly wearing jewels that had once belonged to the head of the House of Fëanor in Ennor—and there were many others who fit that description as well—but there were yet more who would not care just where the jewelry came from, if it was sufficiently splendid and people could not connect it to one of the Kinslayers just by looking at it. And besides, jewelry, like weapons, could be remade.)

And here, Elrond finally came up against the problem that he had been trying to ignore the entire time he had been following Celebrimbor to this place.

He kneaded his right hand with his left, exerting the sort of pressure that Elrond _knew_ would have been cruelly tight, if he could actually feel it at all. But that was just the thing, wasn’t it? He could not feel it, not at all.

Elrond could not feel his right hand. He had already spent so much time dwelling upon all of the difficulties that this could cause him, the longer time wore on without any feeling returning to his flesh, but one in particular returned to the front of his mind now. Elrond could not feel his right hand, and as long as he could not feel so much as an inch of flesh, as long as he could not direct any one of his fingers or any one of the muscles in his hand, there was no way that he could write legibly.

Not that Elrond did not _try_ , at least at first.

Trying to write with his left hand was out of the question. Elrond did not know immediately just what the result of placing a pen in his numb right hand would be, but he knew _exactly_ what the results would be if he tried to write with his off-hand. Instead, he placed his pen in his right hand, fighting down a wave of almost nauseated shame when he found that he had to force his fingers shut by pushing them shut with his left hand. But fight it down he did, because that was how he was just going to have to write: guide the right hand with the left one, carefully enough that he would be able to write something even remotely legible, even if he had to write in larger script than he would normally have utilized.

He started on something basic, a gold bracelet designed to resemble a snake devouring its own tail, with emeralds for eyes. This was something that he could have written a description of in about ten seconds, if he had had the use of his right hand. It would serve as a good test.

Slowly, laboriously, Elrond moved his right hand about the parchment, the way he imagined a child would move a doll’s hand across a surface, miming the action of writing. He tried not to focus on the way his handwriting was turning out while he was still in the act, itself, instead focusing on reaching his endpoint, and then taking the product as a whole thing, instead of bits and pieces that could signify nothing by comparison.

He reached his endpoint, and now, _now_ , Elrond took his hands away from the parchment, so that he could evaluate his work.

It was…

Elrond’s face grew hot, far hotter than the warmth of the chamber could ever have hoped to account for.

He had been taught how to write at a young age. He no longer remembered just who his earliest tutors had been, but his tutelage had begun in the Lisgardh, and had hardly paused when he had come to live in Amon Ereb, instead. It had been considered important that he and his brother, Sindarin princes, even if their mother was queen over a refugee camp and nothing else, Ñoldorin princes, even if their father was absent and their grandmother had never been allowed the chance to be queen over anything, be as highly literate as their surroundings would allow them to be. Someone, Elrond did not know how, but _someone_ , had looked at the Lisgardh and someone managed to come to the conclusion that, some day, children who had been born there would have need of greater skills than the Lisgardh itself would ever require.

Elrond did not know who that person had been. Perhaps it had been his mother. Perhaps not. Either way, someone had begun teaching him and his brother to write almost as soon as they were able to string full sentences together (Even if those sentences _were_ rather basic). In Amon Ereb and in the camps that followed it, their lessons had continued, and this time, Elrond had no question about who, just who, had looked at their desolate surroundings and thought that, one day, children who were raised there, in _those_ places, would one day have need of greater skills than their surroundings would ever require. Maglor, Elrond thought, had even less cause to think such things than Elwing, but he had given Elrond and Elros an education unequal to their surroundings anyways. Elrond would never understand why. He knew only that the education he had received, as far away from his surroundings as it might have shot, had left him far more able to cope with his new environment than an education that had been limited to the scope of his life in Beleriand, not yet drowned, would have done.

Granted, being a highly-literate child meant that Elrond had quickly grown bored of the few books that were his and Elros’s when he was still a child, and the books that they could have were limited to the books that they could carry with them without burdening them or the wagons overmuch. When you were both highly-literate and highly curious, you wanted to have more of a selection than just reading the same ten books over and over and over again, and when you did _not_ have a selection greater than ten books, you… Well, you looked for alternative sources.

Many of the soldiers who yet followed after Maedhros and Maglor had been better storytellers than you would have thought, given their demeanors. Or perhaps it was the fact that it had been so long since there had last been any children in their company, so long since they had last had any children who they could interact with or care for in any way, that had motivated them to try harder than they otherwise would have done. Elrond did not know. He had no way of knowing, now. The results, though, they were something that could be known.

Elrond and Elros had spent many an evening listening to the soldiers telling them stories. Many of those stories had not exactly been _age-appropriate_ , mind you, but they had been stories that Elrond and Elros had never heard before, stories that they were happy to listen to again once enough time had passed that they were no longer so fresh in their minds as all that. They had been stories that had transported Elrond and Elros far, far away from their present surroundings, stories that they could just sink into and drift away from their circumstances. They had been stories that let Elrond forget about everything that was going on around him, let him forget about everything that had happened _to_ him, even if only for a little while.

Maglor had told them stories as well, on stormy nights when they were small and yet too frightened of the torrential rain and the tremendous thunder and lightning to fall asleep alone or unaided, later in the camps when the nights were cold and they pressed close to his sides for warmth, later in the camps when they were old enough to fight and one of them had been injured during the latest skirmish and were too uncomfortable to sleep. Maglor’s stories had not been of the same type as the stories the soldiers told, not at all. They were not stories that you sank into. They were stories that tried to sink into you. But he who had such an enchantingly appealing voice when he put his voice into song, possessed a voice that was hardly any less enchantingly appealing when he merely spoke, and when Maglor poured the power of his voice into the stories he told to two young children he had decided to take on as his own, perhaps in pity or perhaps in hubris (Elrond wondered sometimes about the true impulse; for the most part, his mind settled on ‘pity,’ but sometimes…), there was nothing Elrond could do but listen.

(Maedhros had never told them any stories. Sometimes, Elrond wondered about that, but then, there were times when he wondered just what sort of stories Maedhros would have _told_ , if ever he could be persuaded to loosen his tongue. Eventually, he managed to _stop_ wondering.)

He had tried to commit those stories to paper, sometimes. It wasn’t a public affair, what he did, and he had soon abandoned those attempts, for more reasons than just one. The first reason he had abandoned it, the more _pressing_ reason Elrond had abandoned his efforts, was what he had discovered—no, not what he had discovered, what he had finally, at length, been forced to admit to himself. There was sinking into the past, there was drowning beneath its waters, and then there was what Elrond had been doing to himself, when he tried to write down what he remembered of the stories Maglor had told him and Elros when they were children. What was happening to him when he tried to write them down, when he tried to remember them, that was not drowning, because drowning was a word wholly insufficient to describe what was happening to him. Elrond, even with mastery of two languages and efforts to master several more, had never found a word that could describe it properly.

The secondary reason, of course, had been that so much of the power of those stories had been rooted in Maglor’s voice, and once you divorced the words from the voice that had spoken them, there was little in them that Elrond could honestly say was worth recording. He had written and written and written, and when he was done writing, all he could do was stare in frustration at something that might have the same structure as what he had once heard, but was totally, utterly unequal to what he was trying to _express_.

That particular strain of frustration was a strain similar to what he was feeling now, except Elrond was not certain that he had _ever_ felt frustration like what he felt now.

To say that the handwriting he had achieved was fully legible would have been, on some level, an exaggeration. It was legible… if you squinted. And tilted your head. And made your prayers to whichever one of the Rodyn was supposed to govern the realms of writing—he thought it might be Aulë, though he had heard arguments made for Gwîr that he thought to be quite compelling as well—and by some chance that Rodon actually happened to both be listening to you, and actually be inclined to answer your request in a way that wasn’t just laughing in your face. _Elrond_ could tell what it was meant to say, but he was self-aware enough to know that that had a lot more to do with the fact that he was the one who had written the words, and had written them quite recently, than because it was in any way objectively legible. Anyone else who happened to read this page of his notes was more likely to wonder what small child had gotten into Elrond’s supplies while he was staying in the inn back at the port.

_Will I even be able to read this in a few hours?_ he wondered bitterly, digging his fingernails into the back of his right hand. _Is it just memory that allows me to have any idea at all of what I’ve written? What is the point of taking these notes if, when it comes time for me to make my report, I find my notes completely indecipherable? What is the point of taking notes for my report if I can’t_ use _anything I have written in my notes?_

There was only one answer to those questions: as long as this state of affairs with his hand was as it was, Elrond’s notes would be completely unusable.

As long as he was the one writing them, anyways.

And with that, Elrond looked to Celebrimbor for the first time since he had entered the treasure vaults.

It took Elrond a little while for his gaze to settle on Celebrimbor; he was no longer standing by the doors, and with the revelation of light within this place, he had put his lamp back into the bag slung from his shoulder, depriving Elrond of an incandescent blue light source from which he could have pinpointed Celebrimbor’s location. When at last he spotted Celebrimbor, the man was standing off by a rack of what looked like ceremonial swords (he could not bring himself to believe that there would have been any weapons within this place that were purely decorative; even in a place such as this castle, that would have had _more_ than enough weapons ready to be used by anyone who could use them, Elrond could not imagine Maedhros _ever_ having any time for weapons whose only use was to be hung up and look pretty) with his back turned to Elrond. There was not the strange slouch that Elrond had seen come over him from time to time. Instead, he stood straight and tall, and his head was not bowed, but tilted up—he was looking at something, though from this distance, Elrond could not tell precisely what.

The fact that Celebrimbor seemed more alert here than he had been elsewhere in the castle, during the day, did solve one part of the problem. It did nothing for the shame bubbling up, bitterly caustic and blisteringly hot, in Elrond’s throat, but at least, once he found it in himself to actually ask the question, he could at least be assured that he wasn’t likely to have to ask it twice before Celebrimbor actually registered what he was saying. Elrond drew a deep breath. When this completely failed to push down the shame or steady himself in any way, he let out a hot, irritated sigh, and started towards Celebrimbor anyways. There were more important things than his pride, no matter how it might scream when it was pricked.

Celebrimbor did not acknowledge Elrond as he approached, but this was not necessarily, in and of itself, a worrying sign. Like many Exiles, Celebrimbor was easily lost in his work. (Like many _Exiles_ , good grief; Elrond was easily counted among the number of those who lost themselves in their work so easily that an entire day could pass before they realized that they’d not gotten up to eat since before they sat down at this table, and to claim otherwise would have been the height of hypocrisy.) If someone could easily become lost in their work, they could easily become lost in observation, as well; there were many for whom observation _was_ work, and many more for whom observation was such close kin to work that they could easily be mistaken for each other at even a small distance. The painter must closely observe their subjects before they could begin even to sketch, let alone _paint_. The translator must closely observe and read the work they intended to translate in its original language before they could even begin to make the plan for how they were going to translate the work into the desired tongue. The smith must closely observe metal ore they had been given, the better to ensure that there were no impurities that would render whatever they wished to do with that metal impossible, _before_ they had poured hours of blood, sweat, and tears into work that could never be completed.

When Elrond came to stand at Celebrimbor’s side, he found that though Celebrimbor was standing before the rack of beautifully-made and beautifully-adorned swords, he was not looking at the swords exactly. He was instead staring intently at a large, circular shield that had been hung up on the wall just off to the right of the rack, his chin propped up on his right hand, an intense frown stamped on his face.

So, Celebrimbor was definitely anchored firmly in the present, even if whatever was anchoring him here was not giving him much happiness or contentment. Then again, that frown looked more like a frown of bemusement than of either anger or disquiet…

Momentarily putting aside the distasteful request he must make, Elrond asked him, “What is it?”

Pale, bright eyes darted suddenly to Celebrimbor’s face, with such a quality to his gaze that it was clear to Elrond that Celebrimbor had not marked his approach. Before Elrond could even open his mouth to form an apology, though, Celebrimbor nodded to the shield, his mouth twisting into a deeper frown. “The pearls are missing off of this shield.”

Now, it was Elrond’s turn to frown. “How would you know that there were pearls on the shield?”

Celebrimbor snorted. “We took this shield with us from Aman. I used to play with it as a boy, and even once I was too old to consider playing with a shield a good time, I still liked to look at it often. There were pearls set into the shield— _large_ ones, pearls that it would have been impossible for the observer not to notice, if they looked at the shield even briefly. They’re gone. The depressions where they were set are still there, but the pearls themselves are gone. Look for yourself.”

And Elrond did look. The shield was clearly purely decorative—where swords could have their hilts set with jewels and still be usable in the field, generally speaking Elrond did not think it so advisable to have a shield weighed down with precious stones, the likes of which were present here.

The shield Celebrimbor was scrutinizing was… Well, there was no other appropriate term for it, but to say that it was stupendously beautiful. This time, Elrond could have no doubt that the main body of the shield was beaten silver, rather than mithril, for there was a faint tarnish upon it that managed to detract from its beauty not a whit. (And this, Elrond supposed, was the last bit of proof he had needed that the shield was meant purely for decorative purposes; he might have been no expert in metallurgy, but he knew enough about silver to know that it was too heavy and too soft to be of any real use as the main body of a shield.) Some of the jewels were coated in a film of dust, while others had clearly been freshly wiped down—Elrond cast a surreptitious glance at Celebrimbor’s hands and sleeves, and sure enough he saw some gray-brown streaks on one of the latter that he thought likely to prove significant—and those free of dust glittered and sparkled as if lit up by their own, native light.

The silver shield was adorned with an array of rubies and garnets and jet stones and diamonds, a few close to the center as large as chicken eggs, that Elrond thought at first to be arrayed into the petals of a great flower. His wonder withered slightly, replaced by a crawling apprehension, when he realized that he was in fact looking upon gemstones arrayed in the shape of an eight-pointed star.

Made in Valinor, was it? Elrond thought he could guess what use it had been put to, thought he could narrow down to the decade just when the shield had been made.

He supposed he probably should have been expecting something like this, out of a foray into the past of the House of Fëanor.

But what was this about indentations where there should have been pearls? Elrond saw no such…

No, wait. He could see it now.

Considering the sheer splendor of the gemstones that adorned the shield, it was only natural that the eyes should be drawn towards its center. Doubtless there had been many in Valinor whose eyes had been drawn irresistibly towards the center of the shield, and doubtless, most of those had not mistaken the eight-pointed star for a flower. But the center was not all there was to the shield.

Along the edges of the shield, there were little pitted dots, perfectly circular in shape and perfectly uniform in size. Truth be told, between the wavy streaks of tarnish and all of the dust, Elrond was not certain he would have spotted the little pits right away, even had it not been for the presence of the jeweled star. As Elrond drew a little closer, his gaze homing in on the pits, he could see that, though no jewels adorned them, they were not totally empty. There was something else there, something that looked like little teeth, or maybe claws…

Elrond thought of his own jewelry, of the jewelry he had left behind in his chambers in the capital, and the ways by which stones were kept from falling out of the pendants or rings or brooches or earrings they were set into. He thought about it, and then, as the answer to one question came to him, that answer succeeded only in raising a whole other host of questions.

So… The _pearls_ had been wrenched from the shield, but not the _rest_ of the gemstones in the shield? Yes, pearls were valuable. Yes, they were well-loved and well-prized by the Falathrim, many of whom would have paid a high price to have such pearls for their own—the pits lining the edge of the shield were large enough that the pearls that once sat in them would have been of quite a respectable size—especially since the Isle of Balar was now much more remote from the coastline than it had once been. But the other gems, rubies and garnets and diamonds and jet, they were _right there_ , and with the exception of jet, they were all counted more valuable and all fetched a higher price than pearls, at least nowadays. If a thief had gone to the trouble of wrenching all of the pearls out of the shield, why not go for the other gems as well? The rubies, especially, were an excellent shade, a rich and sparkling red that would have looked especially fine set into literally any brooch or necklace in Ennor, be their materials gold or silver, or even wood or leather.

Why take the pearls, and leave the rest?

Elrond… had an idea about that, actually, but he would need to have a little more of a look around the vault before he could say for certain whether or not his idea held water. Looking to Celebrimbor, he inquired, “Have you seen anything else in here that’s missing its pearls?”

And judging by the quality that suddenly entered Celebrimbor’s frown, he thought that Celebrimbor might be formulating the same idea as him. “I would have to check.” He raised an eyebrow, pinning Elrond with a long, questioning stare. “Would you care to join me?”

Celebrimbor led Elrond to examine a few more shields hanging up on different sections of wall, led him to examine a few swords and daggers and on one occasion an axe made of solid _gold_ , all items which Celebrimbor confidently remembered as having once contained pearls.

Every last one of them, from the shields to the swords to the daggers to the faintly ridiculous golden _axe_ , had empty little pits where those pearls had once been.

Having come back around to the shield with the star made of glittering jewels, Elrond asked, staring at the empty pits, “Maiar?”

Celebrimbor shrugged. “I can think of few others who would be able to get past the security measures designed to keep out thieves. And it would explain why only the pearls were taken; I’ve never heard of Sea Maiar who were so enamored of other jewels that they would go out of their way to pry them out of their settings.”

Elrond… would never really understand the thought processes of Maiar, honestly. Yes, he knew he was descended from one. He couldn’t really pretend that Melian’s thought processes were all that easy to understand, whenever he read literally anything about her. If _he_ had been in here with the intention of wresting jewels from their settings, he would have just taken all of them, and not just the pearls.

Then again…

Now, it was Elrond’s turn to fix Celebrimbor in a long, questioning stare. “Celebrimbor? You said that this shield was made in Valinor, didn’t you?”

Celebrimbor was squeezing his eyes shut. “…Yes.”

“The pearls were… They were a gift from the Falmari, weren’t they?”

Celebrimbor pinched the bridge of his nose, just between his eyes. “Yes.”

“I think we know why the Maiar _really_ only took the pearls, then.”

In a tone like he was trying to pull a dagger out of his abdomen without screaming, “Yes, I think we do.”

The sheer awkwardness of this revelation was enough, for a few moments, to distract Elrond from why he had walked over to Celebrimbor in the first place, enough to distract him from his actual purpose. Those were a nice few moments. Well, as nice as they could be, when Elrond was made to think about pearls and their original owners, and why efforts might be made to return them to their original owners.

But those moments must pass, eventually, and Elrond’s memory, sharp as it was, must recall his true purpose in coming over to where Celebrimbor stood.

He sucked in a deep breath through his nose, trying one last time to try to chafe feeling back into his right hand. His right hand might be stiff after so many hours without feeling, but if he could feel it, if he could arrange his fingers properly, if he could move his hand without having to move it with his left, if he could just get his handwriting to something closer to easily legible, even if it wasn’t particularly neat…

This last-ditch effort had no effect. Last-ditch efforts rarely had any effect.

The moment had arrived. The only thing trying to put it off would achieve would be that Elrond would go longer without getting any real work done.

“Celebrimbor…”

It was a long moment before Celebrimbor, who had resumed staring at the shield with a furrowed brow and an abstracted, almost troubled gleam in his eyes, tore his gaze away from the shield to look down at Elrond. He tilted his head to one side, a strange, almost childlike gesture that made Elrond feel a little as if this treasure vault should be somewhere other than where it was. Some _time_ other than where it was.

“What is it?” Celebrimbor asked, and at least his voice did not _sound_ like the voice of a child’s, even if there was something in his tone, something Elrond could not quite pinpoint, that was nearly as childlike as the way he had tilted his head.

Elrond took a moment to remind himself that even if there was some teasing in the moment, Celebrimbor was not the sort of man who would have mocked him for this weakness. He had to take that moment. It was the only thing that could convince him to push the words past the gate of his teeth.

“I can’t write with my hand like this,” Elrond told him bluntly. Now that the moment had arrived, he might as well get it out of the way without preamble, as quickly as possible. “I need to take notes on at least _some_ of the objects in the vaults, but I can’t take any notes with my hand so numb. I’ve already tried, and I could barely read it at all.” Defensiveness melted away abruptly, leaving him to stare up appealingly at Celebrimbor, almost begging, “If I dictate to you, will you write my notes for me today?”

He could have refused. Elrond was well-aware that he could have refused. Celebrimbor was here to guide him through Himring, here to open the doors that Elrond could not have opened on his own, hear to provide some measure of protection on the off-chance that they were beset by attackers (Attackers who could do more to them than the ghosts could, at any rate). Celebrimbor was _not_ here to aid Elrond in his assignment in any way other than those. He did not _have_ to agree to any request of Elrond’s to take down notes dictated to him.

Given how Celebrimbor had been acting off and on ever since they had first made their way into the castle, given what unknown thing the ghost had done to him, there was also the chance that Celebrimbor just wouldn’t have had it in him to do as Elrond asked. His concentration might have been too impaired, or his will might be too eroded, or he might just be too uninterested in anything but whatever it was he was thinking about, or just too uninterested in anything that wasn’t having as little to do with the castle itself until it came time for them to leave the island.

If Celebrimbor refused, Elrond had little recourse. He could beg and plead, but he would not stoop to demands or to threats, and not only because he knew that he had no real way to back up either the demands or the threats, not against a man so much taller than him, not against a man who was armed with a sword when Elrond had only a dagger, a man who had two working hands, a man who labored intensively in a forge for at least a couple of hours nearly every day, whereas Elrond was more likely to do battle with an old pharmacopeia. If Celebrimbor refused, there was little Elrond could do to make him change his mind, and if Celebrimbor refused, all Elrond would have to go on later when he got to the part of his report that dealt with the treasure vaults was his memory. His memory was _good_ , yes, but it was not infallible. He could not write the most accurate, most detailed report possible unless he had written notes.

Celebrimbor’s eyes searched his face for a long moment, lips slightly pursed, a gleam Elrond could not for the life of him decipher—and he was _trying_ —in his eyes. But then, to Elrond’s relief, he nodded. “As you wish.”

And if he was speaking with less enthusiasm than was perhaps ideal, well, Elrond would try to contain himself to the most salient items here. He needed enough material to scintillate, enough material to entice. He did not need to go through the entirety of the vaults to get the point across.

A half-hearted but wholly relieved smile crept across Elrond’s lips. “Thank you, Celebrimbor.”

There was the shadow of a smile on Celebrimbor’s lips in response to that, but it passed so quickly that Elrond would wonder later if he hadn’t just imagined it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Gwîr** —Vairë
> 
> **Anor** —the Sindarin name for the Sun   
> **Calaquendi** —“Elves of the Light”; the Elves who came to Aman from Cuiviénen, or were born there, especially those born during the Years of the Trees and had born witness to their light; the Vanyar, the Ñoldor, and the Falmari (singular: Calaquendë) (Quenya)  
>  **Edhel** —Elf (plural: Edhil) (Sindarin)  
>  **Edhil** —Elves (singular: Edhel) (Sindarin)  
>  **Ennor** —Middle-Earth (Sindarin)  
>  **Falathrim** —‘People of the foaming shore’ (Sindarin) or ‘Coast people’ (Sindarin); the Sindar of the Havens of the Falas in Beleriand; Círdan’s people.  
>  **Falmari** —those among the Teleri who completed the journey to Aman; the name is derived from the Quenya falma, '[crested] wave.'  
>  **Laegrim** —the Green-Elves of Ossiriand (singular: Laegel) (plural: Laegil; Laegrim is class-plural term); the division of the Nandor who followed Denethor, son of Lenwë; the name was imposed upon them by the Sindar, because of the lush forests of their land, because of their especial love for the forests and waters of their land, and because the Laegrim often dressed in green as camouflage  
>  **Lisgardh** —A marshy region by the Mouths of Sirion, a land of reeds that grow man-high and dense as a forest. Its name in earlier drafts was ‘Arlisgion,’ translated in The Book of Lost Tales 2 as “the place of reeds” (155).  
>  **Rodon** —Vala (plural: Rodyn) (Sindarin); a common Sindarin name for a Vala  
>  **Rodyn** —Valar (singular: Rodon) (Sindarin): a common Sindarin name for the Valar  
>  **Úmanyar** —'Those not of Aman' (singular: Úmanya—probably) (adjectival form: Úmanyarin); those Elves who did not make the journey to Aman, and/or were not born there


	16. Chapter Sixteen

Elrond had never asked to be transported to the past, and yet, as he and Celebrimbor went over the treasure vaults of Himring Castle, the past was by inches the place to where he was transported, except for the moments when he was not transported by inches but by _miles_ , and he could do nothing but fall, fall, fall into it, until he found a handhold that was available to his left hand and not his right, and halt himself for the moment. Just for the moment. As long as he stood in these treasure vaults, as long as he took his inventory, as long as he was stuck _looking_ at everything and drinking it all in, he could never halt the descent for good. That much was beyond him.

Elrond had not at first recognized the exact destination to which he was being transported. This much, at least, was by his own design. He had been trying to keep his mind focused in the present, been trying to keep his mind focused on what his eyes saw, all the glitter and gold of a rich treasure vault looted of nothing but the pearls that Ulmo’s Maiar (yes, Elrond did recognize that it could have been someone else; he did not consider it particularly _likely_ that it was someone else) considered to more rightly belong to others. If the circumstances were different, if _he_ was different, Elrond thought he could have succeeded in such an endeavor. The contents of these treasure vaults were such that Elrond thought that almost anyone who stood within them, among all of the treasure, would have been completely absorbed in whatever their task was, related to the treasure. Even someone who had been sent in here to _clean_ the treasure would have been so absorbed in looking at the treasure and drinking in the wonder it inspired that they would have had a difficult time concentrating on anything else.

Biting back a sigh, Elrond moved to another set of shelves, barely cognizant of Celebrimbor following after him. This time, he had to force himself to look at the contents of the shelves, had to force himself to drink it all in, wondrous and beautiful as it might have been. His stomach churned as his gaze drifted over jewels and gold and silver and the random pieces of electrum interspersed with the rest, eventually rising up to a churn so violent that he had to swallow against his gorge rising in his throat, the sour taste of bile clinging to his tongue.

Anyone else who found themselves stood here would have had no trouble staying in the past. Well… Elrond chanced a glance at Celebrimbor, found him staring at the ground, hands trembling slightly as he clutched at the pen and parchment that Elrond had earlier handed over to him. Almost anyone.

But that was not the point. The _point_ was that almost anyone else would have been able to keep themselves anchored to the present when stood in such a place as this, and would not have even _heard_ the past calling out to them, let alone be dragged along by it. Elrond, though, _Elrond_ was just _special._

Another jittery sigh, this one Elrond couldn’t even be bothered to try to suppress. It might have been easier to ignore it all if he had been able to write for himself, if he had had another task to focus his attention upon, but he had been reckless, letting his temper act for him when he should have let his _mind_ act for him instead, and now he bore the consequences for recklessness upon his own body, and he could not say or guess for how much longer he would bear them. His anxiety over the state of his hand might have been able to hold him up at the surface of the present under other circumstances, but under _these_ , it was only acting as a further drag upon him, dragging him further and further under the surface, speeding his transportation into the past.

The worst of it was, Elrond wasn’t even being transported to a place that he had ever _been_. It might have been a little easier to bear were that the case, if he was he was being dragged headlong back into the past but he was at least still _here_. It would have been less _disorienting_ , certainly, for his imagined surroundings to be somewhere he at least had some concrete point of reference for. Not pleasant, certainly, to be standing in these vaults and expecting to hear the sharp, steady footsteps he had long ago learned to associate with Maedhros ringing out in the hall beyond the open doors. Not pleasant to have to remind himself that this dead man was so incredibly, utterly dead that even his ghost might well have been obliterated by the fire, if he chose not to heed the call of the Doomsman. But it would have been better than what was happening to Elrond instead.

He had heard many, many tales of the wealth of Menegroth. Being who he was, Elrond could hardly have avoided hearing them. He’d heard many tales of the wealth of Gondolin, as well, but tales of Menegroth had always carried a different flavor to them. Whatever that flavor was, Elrond could not properly describe it, only to say that there was something to it that carried an extra, stronger enticement. When they called, it was more difficult to resist.

There had been a few tales told in the Lisgardh, though never by Elwing, and rarely in Elwing’s presence. (The former was hardly surprising, given Elwing’s tender age when she left Menegroth behind her forever. The Edhil might form their first concrete memories at a somewhat younger age than Men, but three years old was still _quite_ young to have much in the way of clear recollections. The latter, on the other hand… Well, given what Elrond remembered of his mother, perhaps the latter was not so surprising, either.) Elrond remembered only bits and pieces of those, but his own half-formed memories told him tales of glitter within caves of stone like the stars in the sky had been brought down much closer to the earth and then joined by a hundred thousand new brethren. Those stories had put him in mind of a Menegroth that was constructed not of stone but of gold and silver and mithril and adamant. They had put him in mind of a place that could never have been real—even the halls of Elbereth and Aran Einior in Valinor could not really be like this, if only because stone worked better as foundations and support structures than gold or silver, and adamant and mithril were _wasted_ in such a function. But Elrond had been a little child listening to these tales, and when he had yet been so young that he had had no real emotional associations with such a place called Menegroth, it had been easy to spin fantasies out of the name in his mind.

There had been no tales told of Menegroth in Amon Ereb or the camps that followed it, and that was fitting, considering that none of those who occupied those places had ever been to Menegroth except to tear it to pieces. That they did not tell tales of Menegroth to those who by all right should have lived there and been accounted as Menegroth’s eventual heirs was the only correct thing.

Where Elrond derived most of his information, most of the information that was derived from tales and not from the few records that had been carried away from a place where much of the wisdom was passed down orally and not on parchment or paper, was from the stories he had heard from Iathrim courtiers in the court of Gil-galad, in this Second Age of Anor.

There were some accounts, like Celeborn and Galadriel’s, that Elrond thought reasonably grounded in reality, if only because Celeborn and Galadriel were _themselves_ reasonably grounded in reality. Thranduil, often more than a little tipsy, Elrond was a little skeptical of, but for the most part, his accounts were close enough to Celeborn and Galadriel’s that Elrond was willing to credit them—for the most part. Nellas, before she had left for Duileth’s far-eastern kingdom, had not given too many interviews, but Elrond thought that her wondering and slightly intimidated account of the only time she had ever come within the gates of Menegroth sounded credible; certainly, she did not sound as if she was trying to make anything sound more glorious than it actually was.

Duileth and Oropher…

There were definitely times when Elrond thought that they were telling their particular tales with an agenda in mind. Most of the time, he thought that that agenda had quite a _lot_ to do with the way Elrond spoke and voted in those few council sessions he had been called upon to attend.

That being said, the tales that Elrond was told amounted to something hardly any less fantastical than the images he had had in his mind as a small children, of a cave-city constructed entirely of silver and gold and mithril and adamant. If they were all true, then in its prime, Menegroth had put even the glory of Gondolin to shade, the wisdom of Melian the Queen guiding the Edhil who lived in Menegroth and the Hadhodrim who had first delved the city to create the most glorious city on the face of Ennor, while it had lasted. If they were all true, Menegroth had been glorious beyond anything that the capital in Lindon could hope to accomplish with the wealth and other resources and the minds that it currently had at its disposal. If they were all true.

Regardless of whether they were all true, they had taken deep root in Elrond’s mind, where they currently refused to be dislodged.

He had heard stories of walls splendid with carvings and murals and tapestries, and this, at least, he could well believe. It was a poor, bleak place indeed that housed so many and yet possessed no decorations on its walls, especially if such a place was located largely underground and could thus have no windows looking upon the outside world. Besides that, tales were told to this day of the wondrous tapestries weaved by Melian and her handmaidens—and they must have been wondrous, indeed, for the tales to still be told in spite of Melian having long ago deserted her kingdom and the people who had been under her protection, the vast majority of her handmaidens being murdered, and all of their tapestries having decades ago sunk into the Sea. Wondrous work, indeed.

(Elrond had interviewed one of Melian’s handmaidens once, a woman by the name of Sílameril. She was, as far as he or anyone else could gather, the last of Melian the Queen’s handmaidens still living, the only one who had survived both of the sacks of Menegroth and then the later sack of the refugee camp in the Lisgardh. Elrond had been quite interested in speaking to her, actually, if only because he thought that someone that he did not already know might be more inclined to give him a wholly accurate, wholly unbiased, wholly ‘No, I am not trying to sell you on any particular policy proposal, and yes, I do remember that of all of the capacities in which you serve Gil-galad, that is not one of them’ account of what Menegroth was like.

It had taken some doing to set up the interview. Sílameril had been living deep in Harlindon at the time and wasn’t too pleased with the idea of traveling to a Ñoldorin stronghold to conduct the interview, she being one of many who apparently liked to forget that her ultimate overlord in those days was the _High King of the Ñoldor_. Elrond had heard that Sílameril had since removed to Amdír’s growing kingdom in Lindórinand, which negated that problem, but still, Elrond could not easily dismiss that first moment of irritated shock from his mind. It annoyed him, and would likely never stop annoying him, how little some people seemed to care about the reality of who their liege lord was.

Anyways, it had taken some doing, but Elrond had eventually managed to secure an interview with this last surviving handmaiden of Melian, Queen of Doriath. He had arranged guest quartering for her in a nice, but fairly isolated corner of the residential portions of the castle, a place where few of the Ñoldor who resided at court made their homes—as ridiculous as Elrond found it that yet another person was so scornful and distrustful of the Ñoldor in spite of living in what was ultimately a Ñoldorin kingdom, he knew it would make her more amenable to sharing her experiences if she was indulged. To that same end, Elrond had agreed to interview Sílameril in her own chambers, rather than insist she come to his or that they meet in a public setting.

The time of the interview arrived, and Elrond made his way to Sílameril’s guest chambers. He knocked, heard her call out from within that the door was not locked, and opened the door, intending fully on making his way inside.

Sílameril had been sitting at a wicker table, pushing a glinting silver needle through a length of crisp white linen cloth, scarlet thread trailing behind the needle in a flutter like a vein. She had set aside her work and started to get up from the table before she really _looked_ up. She had murmured a greeting, looked up at Elrond’s face, and then—

And then, she had just sort of stopped.

And then she stared at him, unmoving and unspeaking, looking for all the world as if she had seen a ghost, for the next ten minutes.

They had wound up having to reschedule the interview to the next day, Elrond pulling a string or two to get Sílameril the use of those chambers for a day longer than she had previously been allotted. That sort of thing tended to happen when your interviewee broke down and started crying hysterically at the very sight of you.)

The tapestries woven by Melian the Queen and her skillful handmaidens were renowned for their beauty and their intricacy, in spite of the fact that they no longer existed on this earth, unless you wanted to count the waterlogged, moldering scraps of cloth that might yet cling to the ocean floor. (When Elrond thought about it, he supposed that Míriel Þerindë’s memory might not be the only one the weavers cursed.) The carvings and murals that adorned the walls and pillars of Menegroth were hardly any less glorious, or so the stories told Elrond, and not least because of all of the precious stones that adorned them, and which were lodged into the stone by such clever methods that even the soldiers who followed after the Sons of Fëanor, when they put the city to the sword, had been unable to wrest from their places.

Tales told Elrond of chandeliers of glittering colored glass strung from multiple points on the ceiling in every room and hallway, granting blessed light to those places that torchlight was insufficient to banish the shadows from. Those tales told Elrond of walls that, even if they had been bare of carvings or murals or tapestries, would still have been full of color for all of the reflections of colored glass upon them, scarlet and golden and violet and deep, deep blue.

Tales told Elrond of trees and bushes and flowerbeds and crawling, creeping vines that were made not of the fibers that made up the plants he would find in a forest, the plants he would find if he went outside of this chamber in which he now stood and stood under the gently raining sky. Tales told Elrond that these trees and bushes and flowers and vines that he was to find within the halls of Menegroth, if there were halls of Menegroth that an Edhel could yet have walked in, were made of metal, and stone, and jewels. He had been regaled with tales of holly trees lining the avenues that had silver for their trunks, emeralds for their leaves, carnelian for their berries. He had been told of the most delicate roses with brittle pink rose quartz, painstakingly fashioned into sheets as thin as the true petal of a true rose, told tales of roses with petals of rose quartz that looked so like the real thing that anyone approaching them who had not been told the secret would have expected to smell their perfume in the air. In some of these rosebushes there had been little honeybees made of gold and jet and diamond placed on the rose blossoms, which only accentuated the effect.

This was just Menegroth, the city. Menegroth’s treasure vaults were reportedly vaster by many times over than even the richest treasure vaults of the richest lords of the Hadhodrim ever to walk this earth. If the stories of what Menegroth the city had been like, of all of the riches that were just out and about for the general pleasure of the general public were to be believed, then this was not so far beyond comprehension or credulity as all that. If the other stories were true, then Elrond supposed it was not so far-fetched that the treasuries of Thingol and Dior could have been so outlandishly, fantastically rich.

Oropher had been fond of stories of rivers of gold and silver dammed into pillars that rose so high as to overshadow even Thingol and Melian, as much as they towered head and shoulders over every other living soul in Doriath. Duileth had told stories of chests upon chests just filled with jewels—not jewelry, but just _jewels_ , polished and cut, jewels in so great an abundance that they simply sat in those chests, waiting for a use beyond simply… No, they did not even gather dust, for there were servants whose duties centered entirely around polishing them every day to ensure that if Thingol ever wished to observe them, he would not have to come across any jewel that had lost its luster.

There was plenty of jewelry, though; Duileth had been careful to assure Elrond of that. If you listened to her and you ran on the assumption that she was neither remembering things wrong nor deliberately exaggerating the wealth of Menegroth in its heyday, then to listen to Duileth was to come to one stark conclusion: that in the treasure vaults of Menegroth alone, completely leaving out the personal jewelry boxes of the residents of the city, there were enough individual items of jewelry that if Elrond was to come into possession of every last one of them, and if he was to wear one piece of jewelry every day and then discard it, he would still have a sizeable hoard stashed away come the breaking of the world. If Duileth was to be believed, _this_ had been what was true of Menegroth’s treasuries, and Elrond… Elrond thought he could believe it. Thingol’s love of things that glittered had been well-known, and the Iathrim _Elrond_ knew loved beauty well, especially the beauty that could be formed from the works of their own hands, even if they were more than a little picky as to the source.

There were the weapons of the treasure hoard as well, such as Anglachel, later called Gurthang, forged from the flesh of a fallen star, a sword that spoke in a voice that at least one man could hear, and possibly, though Elrond had yet to confirm it positively, a voice that others could hear as well. (Eöl could probably have heard that voice, though given _every last thing_ that had happened with Eöl, Elrond had found few who were particularly comfortable speaking of him, and honestly, Elrond wasn’t terribly comfortable _asking_ about him.) Elrond had relatively little information about the other weapons to be found in that treasure hoard, but he would hardly be surprised to learn that there were swords and spears and axes and bows to match or at least come close to matching Anglachel. Doriath had endured for hundreds of years. The idea that the treasure hoard had not been full to bursting with deadly and beautiful weapons was a foreign one to Elrond.

It was… It was strange, thinking of the treasure vaults of Doriath as being full of things that could have come to belong to Elrond, in time. It wasn’t an idea that ever quite fit right in Elrond’s mind. It was so disparate from his own experiences as his mother’s son, so contrary to his own childhood in a world where Doriath, though deserted, was not yet drowned beneath the waters of the Sea, that to reconcile it had proved an impossible task. Elrond could not make it fit into his world as he had experienced it, and thus, for the most part, he did not think about it. When he was forced by his work to think about it, he did at least _try_ to think about it in a way that did not involve speculation about inheritance and ownership. He tried, for the most part, to think of the treasure vaults of Menegroth without thinking of the fact that, in another world, in a world where that second sack of Menegroth had never occurred and he and his brother had somehow managed to be born anyways, he could have grown up _playing_ in those treasure vaults, that a necklace that had belonged to his maternal grandmother might not have been his only somewhat-inappropriate plaything but just one of a countless number of somewhat-inappropriate, glittering playthings.

It was a strange feeling, thinking about it. It made Elrond feel as if his spirit was trying to come dislodged from his still-living flesh. It made him feel like the ground was shifting beneath his feet, peeling away to reveal a lightless abyss that would swallow him up and spit him out somewhere he would barely recognize, in spite of the fact that it had been described to him a thousand times.

Elrond did not wish to be transported to the past. If he had, he would have asked. Elrond did not want to be anywhere but the present, no matter how unattractive that the present might be. The present was… They had not been left with much, after all of the screaming and the crying and the burning and the drowning had been over and done with. Compared to what they had once had, they had been left with barely anything at all. So much beauty lost, so many riches lost, so much knowledge lost, so many _lives_ lost, all things that would never be returned to Ennor for as long as it endured in the form it presently occupied. The world they were now left with was incomplete, and the fact that the vast majority of an entire continent had sank beneath the surface of the Sea was only the most superficial aspect of it. (A _large_ superficial aspect, but a superficial aspect, it remained.) The world was incomplete, and could never be made whole for as long as it endured.

Such a state of affairs was hardly ideal, but to Elrond, it was still preferable to being transported into a world that was something closer to whole, but that he could not influence or interact with in any way, a world he could drift through as a ghost, and do nothing but watch in sick fascination and horror as it careened ever closer towards its cataclysmic disasters. He did not wish to exist as a phantasm, a witness to disaster, not either in truth nor even simply in the illusions conjured by memory and imagination. He did not wish to live in a world where the only comfort was the comfort that he wrapped around his own shoulders, a cold, moth-eaten thing comforting only because of its familiarity, something where he was not sure why it was that he even found it comforting, something whose origins had long since been lost to him along with many of the things that had been plunged beneath icy waters.

He did not wish to be transported to the past.

He did not wish to be transported to the past.

He did not wish to be transported to the past.

Elrond had his wishes, and then he had the world, and the forces that influenced it. He had his wishes, and then he had the forces that influenced his mind and his memory. And if there was one thing Elrond had learned over the course of his life—and his life had been, thus far, quite short for one of the Edhil—it was that his wishes mattered very, very little in the face of the forces that influenced the world in which he must live and the way he interacted with it.

He was here in the treasure vaults of Himring Castle, trying to carry out his assigned duties and take a preliminary, necessarily incomplete inventory of the treasures to be found within, even if he could not carry out _all_ of his duties and must needs have Celebrimbor writing down his notes in his place. And he was _doing_ that, even if there were moments when Elrond had to stop and stare at something especially fantastical that he came across, like that necklace of impossibly fine gold chain and impossibly bright sapphires strung along the length of the chain. Elrond had come here with a purpose in mind, and he was _trying_ to fulfill that purpose as best as he could.

But when he was stood here, in this place, it was hard to keep his mind entirely focused on when and where he was. Here were the riches of a dead lord of the Eldar, shut up in the ruins in the greatest fortress of the Eldar of the First Age of Anor. Maedhros and Thingol had never been friends, and would likely never have been even if Celegorm and Curufin had not intervened in such an injurious fashion during the borderline-absurd tumult that was Lúthien and Beren’s courtship. There was little enough chance that these two lords of the Eldar would ever have had the sort of relationship that would have facilitated the exchange of treasure, of knowledge, of letters, of anything that could justify… _this_. And yet…

 _I am where I am. I am when I am. This is a ruin, and Menegroth is a ruin beneath the Sea. All that lives in Menegroth is crabs and eels and maybe the Maiar if they aren’t too put off by the idea of living in an aquatic tomb. All that lives here are the ghosts. This is not a place for the living. Menegroth is not a place for the living. Menegroth would have been a poisoned chalice of an inheritance, anyways. If my grandfather and both of my uncles were to pass away, and the people decided that they would rather have me as their ruler instead of my mother—_ and given that his mother had married a prince of the Exiles, Elrond supposed he had at least one reason for why the Iathrim might have passed her up— _what sort of life would that have been?_

Elrond knew what sort of life that would have been. At least, he thought he knew. He had only his intuition to go on, but though his intuition had at times led him wrong, there were more occasions in which it had least led him in the general direction of where he needed to go.

So. Let us say that Menegroth survived that first sack by the Hadhodrim, and for whatever reason, most likely because Dior showed more sense than he had ever showed in this strain of time and world and returned the Silmaril to Maedhros when he sent for it, the second sack never occurred and Menegroth was never abandoned. Let us _then_ say that, for whatever reason, and this one, Elrond had a little more trouble with—you didn’t just walk up to the Rodyn and ask them to be more _careful_ about the way they shattered a continent—either Beleriand did not sink below the waves, or Doriath did not, and there was some sort of land bridge connecting it to Eriador, or else there were calm enough waters between this newly-rendered island kingdom and the mainland that a roaring sea-land trade was possible.

Let us then assume that something befell Dior—let us just say that he fell off of a crumbling cliff. Eluréd and Elurín disappeared into the forest—perhaps Nan Elmoth was still around for this scenario; plenty of people vanished in that forest, it would have been fitting—or they abdicated the throne in turn, or they decided to become Men and were just stripped of any right to hold the throne of Doriath at all. That leaves Elrond. Even if Elros had chosen to remain of the Edhil in this scenario, Elrond was still the elder twin, and the throne of Doriath was not designed to be held by two.

Elrond knew how Dior had healed Menegroth after the throne held by his grandfather fell to him. The Silmaril may not have been his by rights, but it had responded to him, responded to him to heal and to rebuild, rather than to burn and to devastate. (Perhaps it was the blood of Melian the Maia. Elrond could not say for sure.) The only way Doriath could have endured past the winter when the Sons of Fëanor fell upon it would be if Dior had surrendered the Silmaril to them. Assuming that Doriath was able to survive everything _else_ that befell Beleriand afterwards, short of the utter destruction wrought by the Rodyn—and that was a big assumption, but let’s just _assume_ —without the Silmaril, the process of healing and rebuilding Doriath from what ills had already befallen it would have been slower. If it was even possible at all.

Elrond would have inherited the charge of a kingdom much diminished by war and by suffering and by the destruction of so much of the land beyond its borders. He would have inherited the charge of a kingdom much diminished by the ill will it had rightfully poured upon itself by closing its borders to those in need time and time again. He wondered if there would have been a mass exodus out, of those looking for greener pastures and easier lives there. If so, he could hardly have stopped them. A king was a king only over a land that he could both protect and nurture. All that did not fit both categories was not his domain, and he could not ask, let alone _demand_ , that anyone remain there. To claim otherwise was the claim of a tyrant, and a toothless tyrant, at that.

Elrond… He was not averse to the idea of healing, you know. He would hardly have attended to his healing lessons with such diligence if it was otherwise. He was not averse to the idea of healing a wounded land. But he _was_ averse to the idea of yoking himself to a land whose ills were…

He could not think like that. He knew the folly of thinking like that. This world was left with a multitude of ills whose authors were no longer available to heal them, and yet must be healed anyways. You could not throw up your hands and abdicate all responsibility because you did not want to shoulder a burden that you did not feel should be yours.

He knew that. Perhaps someday, Elrond would be able to translate the knowledge into a willingness to shoulder the burden himself, even knowing that responsibility for it more rightly belonged to another. He hoped that. He truly did hope that. He knew it was churlish to shirk the responsibility, when there was something, anything, that he could have done about it himself.

And besides that, dominion was not something he sought for himself. There were the idle fantasies of having halls of his own, someday, but dominion was not something that had ever entered into those fantasies. It was not… It just wasn’t for him.

Set aside the past. Set it aside. It might be enticing, sometimes, to think of what might have been—for Elrond, it was many times more than just a _little_ enticing to indulge in these fantasies, though few of the most enticing ones involved Doriath above the waters in any way, shape, or form—but to sink into a pleasant fantasy of the past was still to _sink_ , to be submerged, to eventually find yourself _drowning_.

He knew that.

He knew that.

He knew that.

He was here, and yet, the world or his mind or his treacherous heart was trying to drag him somewhere else.

Elrond sucked in another deep breath, going to knead his numb right hand for what felt like the thousandth time today. The fact that the flesh of his right hand felt absolutely _nothing_ , even though he knew perfectly well the not-inconsiderable force he was exerting upon it, even though he could see the red marks he was raising in his pale flesh, well, that was something. It was something highly unpleasant. It was less unpleasant than drowning. And Elrond’s hand had never before been thus afflicted. Unpleasant as it might have been, it was serving him well as a way to stay anchored here, in this place and in this time.

It would have been more pleasant if Elrond had not needed the anchor at all, of course. But he had never known a time when he was capable of having absolutely all that he wished for. He would make do. He had always made do.

Needing the distraction from his own labyrinthine, thorny thoughts, Elrond turned his gaze to Celebrimbor. They had both been silent for long moments in this warm, quiet, and slightly muggy place, and Elrond could only guess at what Celebrimbor had made of his silence. Beyond the idea that it would give him a break from writing out notes that he had no doubt never thought that he would be writing, notes that he’d not had to write but had chosen to anyways—let it not be said that Elrond was ungrateful, let it not be said that he was so quick to forget kindnesses done to him without any command behind them and without any apparent desire of repayment—Elrond couldn’t begin to guess.

Not exactly, anyways. There was something rather interesting going on with Celebrimbor’s expression, not to mention what was becoming of his _posture_.

The malaise that had struck him down before when they were in the castle was still present. Elrond could not have that much, it would seem, could not have Celebrimbor as he typically was, as he _should_ have been. (They could never really have all of what they wanted, but that just seemed to be part of the condition of being an Edhel.) The malaise was still present, still gripped him too tightly for him to struggle free—if he was even _trying_ to struggle free, anyways.

(Elrond wasn’t going to contemplate that possibility, not at this moment. He knew he had to. He knew he had to, and soon. This could not be allowed to go on for much longer, not if he wanted to be certain that Celebrimbor would be fit to lead them back down the hill to the cave where they had left their boat when it came time for them to leave. More than that, Elrond did not _want_ to leave Celebrimbor in this state. He was less likely to ask prying questions, but he was not _himself_. This had to stop, and soon.)

The malaise was still present, and something else had come down to sit with it, and seemed to find the malaise quite companionable, for the way it refused to be dislodged, for the way the malaise did not seem to even _try_ to dislodge it. (Elrond could only hope that they would not decide that matrimony was in their future, and somehow find a way to produce offspring. That, he thought, was a situation he might not be able to get under control at _all_.) Elrond was not able to identify it at first, let alone grope at the shape of it, but the more he looked—and he _could_ look, for Celebrimbor seemed wholly unaware of the scrutiny that Elrond had placed him under, another sign that Elrond did not like one bit—the more he gathered. And the more he gathered, the more he _saw._

There was something shining bright in Celebrimbor’s eyes, so close to the surface that there, at least, the malaise was burned almost totally away. It did not shine so evenly as Anor when Anor was masked by no clouds, but more like a torch assailed by heavy winds—not winds heavy enough to put it out, but something very close to that, or so Elrond thought. Its light quivered and flickered and dimmed from time to time, but never, ever extinguished itself completely. Its hold on Celebrimbor was yet powerful enough that there was no way to banish it completely, not at this moment.

Elrond’s gaze drifted from Celebrimbor’s bright, abstracted eyes, difficult as that might have been, to regard the rest of his face, then the rest of his body. He saw a taut jaw, teeth clearly gritted beneath lips pursed shut, stiff shoulders and stiff neck, arms tight, muscles surely strained beneath shirt sleeves, hands… Well, he remembered himself enough not to clench his fists, not to do anything that would damage parchment or pen or inkwell, and perhaps that was a sign that Elrond could take as encouraging. But Celebrimbor was a _smith_ , a smith who worked with delicate materials on a regular basis, and surely, the need to handle those delicate materials gentle and carefully would have been so deeply ingrained by now as to be totally automatic, something he did without even thinking about it. (Clever hands, he must have clever hands. Sometimes, Elrond wondered just _how_ clever. A lot, lately, he was wondering how clever.) That he had managed not to crumple parchment or snap pen or crush inkwell and send rivulets of black ink splattering onto the floor did not necessarily signify _anything._

He would be quite sore, come the morning, if he carried all of that tension within him for much longer. Actually, forget ‘the morning’—Celebrimbor would be quite sore come the _evening_ , if he carried that tension within him for much longer. A spike of pity twisted in Elrond’s heart, twinging and bitter, as he looked at Celebrimbor and saw something that was not quite an exact match for his own feelings, but was clearly of close kin.

Elrond looked around the treasure vaults of Himring Castle, biting his lip. They could spend the entirety of the rest of their stay on Tol Himling in this place, never budge from it, dictate notes and write them for the whole time, and still have barely made a dent on this place. But Elrond had never intended for his report to concern only the treasure vaults of Himring Castle. Though he knew it must be the centerpiece of his report, the enticement that would lure explorers in if all else failed, Elrond had never wanted his report to be a report that spoke only of that which glittered and glinted and glistered. That was not the whole of what this place had been. That was not the whole of what Maedhros had been.

Imagination drew him irresistibly towards visions of Maedhros in this place. He should not linger in the past, should not let himself be submerged, should not go anywhere the threat of drowning was stronger than the most absolute remote. But he imagined this place in its prime, and he imagined Maedhros standing in it.

The image could be nothing but incongruous, for Elrond could not imagine Maedhros in finery—even the armor he had worn when he and his put the refugee camp to the sword was, while sturdy and whole and unspotted by any flecks of rust, hardly what Elrond could have called _fine_. Any finery must have been lost to him after he lost Himring, and was forced to wander the wilds as a vagabond. Elrond could only imagine Maedhros in the clothing that had been his when Elrond had known him, and they? Were things that the noble lord of Himring would likely have only worn if he intended to do something in clothing that he absolutely no intention of wearing again.

Incongruous as the image might be, it was how Elrond imagined Maedhros when he imagined him here—a ragged man in ragged cloak, standing among treasure that must have been even more impressive before it was allowed to fall to dust and to tarnish—but once he was able to get past the incongruity of what his imagination had conjured for him to look at it, he pushed past it to _another_ level of incongruity.

Maedhros, standing among treasure. Maedhros, the owner of all of this treasure. This was what Elrond kept running up against, over and over: the noble lord of Himring that he knew logically that Maedhros had once been, versus the man he had become by the time that Maglor found Elrond and his brother cowering under their mother’s bed. Try as he might, they were two jagged puzzle pieces that Elrond could still not make fit against each other, in spite of the fact that when you held them up to the light, they _seemed_ as if they would fit together. Perhaps, in time. Perhaps, perhaps…

Not right now. Elrond had no interest in ‘right now.’ For right now, Elrond had other places in the castle that he needed to see, and he did not wish to dwell among treasure any longer. It would not bring him any happiness. It would not bring him any peace. Quite the opposite, it seemed.

So, he must needs go back to Celebrimbor.

“Celebrimbor?”

Elrond had never been one to start a conversation by clapping somebody else on the shoulder. There was nothing wrong with the gesture, at least so long as no one was doing it to _him_ when he was not expecting it and thus would be rattled by the sudden contact of a hand against his shoulder (Or worse, a hand clapping his back). There was nothing wrong with the gesture, but it was simply not for him. The one or two times he had tried it, it had never felt at all natural to him, and after those one or two times, he had convinced himself with much greater ease than you might think to just stop trying to fit himself into a gesture and an attendant personality that did not fit with him at all. Elrond could be tactile—under the right circumstances. That was not the right circumstance, not the right gesture, not the right anything.

It wasn’t the right thing for him, and yet, Elrond felt his hand itching a little (the left one, obviously; the right still hung at his side as if dead), felt himself wishing that it was a gesture more natural for him. It felt a little less _helpless_ than just standing at Celebrimbor’s shoulder, murmuring his name, and waiting for Celebrimbor to respond, uncertain of just when that would be.

For Celebrimbor did not respond to him at first. Elrond could not tell if that was the product of the malaise that had been sticking to him for a while now, or if it was this new thing, this bright-eyed and taut-bodied thing, that had stripped his hearing from him, or else created a delay between hearing and comprehension large enough to be more noticeable and more profound than that which Elrond had known in others, those who needed him to get their attention _before_ he started speaking to them. Celebrimbor had never been like that, for as long as Elrond had known him, for the few times in the capital when Elrond had needed to go up to him and get his attention. It was not something that could be natural to him; _surely_ , it could not.

Speaking his name again made Elrond feel like a pestering child. It made him feel like an impatient, pestering child who wasn’t willing to give the person whose attention he was trying to get a hold of a chance to set aside what they were doing and answer him properly. Elrond was not a child. He was young in the eyes of many, though he had lived a more eventful life (a regretfully eventful life, he would have given much for it to have been less eventful, considerably less eventful) than many of his acquaintances had by the time they were twice or three times or even four times his own age. He was young in the eyes of many, but he was not a child any longer. He was Peredhil, and thus he had gained adulthood more quickly than an Edhel who had none of the blood of Men within him. To some, the fact that an Edhel his age would have yet been a child made him a child as well. Elrond was not a child. He would not act like one, if he had enough mastery over himself to prevent it.

So Elrond stood at Celebrimbor’s eyes, stared sideways into his eyes and waited for Celebrimbor’s gaze to meet his own. The moments trickled by, and Elrond grew increasingly taut himself as Celebrimbor took his time. What if he had to take Celebrimbor by the hand and lead him away from here himself, before Celebrimbor ever responded to him? It might be more difficult if Elrond couldn’t get Celebrimbor to move his legs, if Elrond had to drag him out, tall man with inches on him and several pounds of muscle on him and utterly uninclined to move without his own will playing a part in it.

Perhaps, with enough time and enough stubbornness, Elrond could drag Celebrimbor all the way back to the kitchen where they slept the night before and press him down onto bedding that perhaps, by now, was dry, though hopefully the act of dragging would have jarred Celebrimbor back to himself _long_ before they got all the way to the kitchens—Elrond thought he would have exhausted himself long before he could reach the kitchen doors, if he didn’t get them lost in what was no doubt a maze of lightless corridors first. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Elrond wasn’t going to do that, either, and for the same reason as he had chosen to wait for Celebrimbor to respond to him without speaking his name a second time.

He wasn’t a child. To act like one risked what he had been struggling against nearly the entire time he stood in this place.

And, at length, Celebrimbor’s eyes cleared somewhat, though Elrond thought they were still a little abstracted, a little distant, a little like the eyes of a man who was not really here. But that did not matter, or, at least, it did not matter _yet_ , did not matter in the face of the fact that Celebrimbor was at last looking at him, at last responding to him. “…Elrond.” His voice was a little faint, pleasantly mild, but not a voice like anything that could give Elrond the comfort of thinking that he had come back to himself. "What is it?”

Elrond drew a breath, told himself not to press on that issue just now. Instead, he held out his hand, first his right out of reflex, and then, after a small grimace, held out his left instead. “May I see the notes you’ve taken down since we first came here?”

Wordlessly, Celebrimbor handed him the sheets of parchment he had been writing on. Not a single comment, not either to give simple assent or to tease in some way. Elrond could not bite back a frown as he accepted the parchment.

_Put it aside. Put it aside, for the moment._

Elrond evaluated the notes, and his eyebrows rose a little higher than where they normally sat on his brow. He knew that they had been in here for a while, but the notes just went on and on, for three whole pages, in Celebrimbor’s small, painstakingly neat handwriting, and Elrond had not thought that they had been here for _this_ long. He’d not thought he had settled upon so many items as all that.

He sighed, relieved in spite of himself. This was more than enough. Between the two of them, they had gathered more than enough information regarding what glittered and glistened and glistered within the confines of Himring Castle to entice those who possessed even the smallest grain of true receptivity to consider the idea of coming to Himring Castle to see what it had to hold for those survivors who dwelled on the shores of Ennor in this Second Age of Anor. They did not have to stay here any longer. They could move on to somewhere else.

It was pitiable to be so relieved by that, but Elrond did not want to drown in the fetid waters of the past.

“I believe this should be enough,” Elrond said decisively, nodding his head in a way that he hoped looked authoritative, rather than just bleeding his relief off into the open air. “Certainly,” he went on, voicing the thoughts that had already been clinging to the walls of his mind, “my whole report should not consist purely of reports of the treasure vaults, and at this rate, if I tried to gain any more information about the vaults to take home with us, that is almost what I would have to do.”

“So, we can leave?” Celebrimbor asked him, with a hopeful desperation in his voice that made Elrond want to flinch, though he was not entirely certain why: it was not as if Elrond had dragged him here kicking and screaming.

 _But I am the reason he cannot leave when he wishes_.

Elrond nodded wordlessly, and that was that. It was not as if there was anything they really needed to put _away_ before they were leaving, and even with just one hand working properly, Elrond could still put his things back in his pack with reasonable speed, and it didn’t take Celebrimbor much time to pull his lamp out of his bag. They were out of the treasure vaults within just a few minutes, Celebrimbor pausing to pull the doors shut behind them, though Elrond was not entirely certain as to why. It was hardly as if they had to worry about thieves here, not when the local sailors were all so superstitious regarding Tol Himling (And not without good reason, Elrond supposed, as he sank his fingernails into his right hand).

Then again, there were more ghosts in this world than just those who could reach out and touch you. Elrond knew that. He had little doubt that Celebrimbor knew it as well. He supposed he could not fault Celebrimbor for slamming those doors so adamantly shut.

That left them standing in the dark, windowless corridor, lit only by the incandescent blue light of Celebrimbor’s lamp, their breathing strangely loud in the humid, uncomfortably close air.

Celebrimbor said nothing to him. For the moment, that was alright, since it at least gave Elrond some time to think.

He had every intention of spending his time here profitably, even if… Elrond bit back a sigh, even uncertain as he was of whether or not it would even be marked. His time in the treasure vaults had left him feeling unsteady and waterlogged, his lungs aching as if he really had narrowly avoided drowning. He could not… He could not be this way…

He could not be this way, and he had to keep looking towards the future. He _had_ to. Forget the fact that the accounts of the treasure in the vaults of the castle would be enough to sway most of the treasure hunters at court. If he spent the rest of his time here dawdling, Gil-galad would _know_. Even if Elrond did not tell him, Gil-galad would still just _know_. Yes, he knew he was being irrational, and yes, he knew that Gil-galad was hardly going to go rifling through his mind to rip the information out. But Elrond, apart from unwise moments as when he had earlier contemplated leaving the ghosts in the town out of his report, didn’t really take seriously his ability to hide anything from Gil-galad at all. Gil-galad was just too discerning. You did not keep secrets from a man such as him, not about anything truly important to the welfare of the realm.

Gil-galad would know that Elrond had spent much of his time here just sitting on his hands, if Elrond conducted himself such. He would not need to be told that Elrond had not done as he was instructed when he was given this assignment, as clearly as if Elrond had written the confession of his guilt upon his face in indelible ink. (Elrond supposed that this was a little like what having a father felt like. It… It did not feel quite like the other moments when he had supposed that this was what having a father felt like, when he had thought about that regarding other men.)

Gil-galad would know what Elrond had done, and honestly, that was not the only reason for why Elrond did not want to go against the terms of his assignment. He had hardly _forgotten_ what he needed a successful report of this place to achieve for him. He needed to start working towards banishing the reputation of the kidnapped child—regardless of how much of a child this castle might make him feel, at times, a child still waiting to hear Maedhros’s voice sounding from behind a shut door.

There was a library here. That had come up early on, and it hardly _surprised_ Elrond that there was a library here, in any case. This was, in its day, one of the great fortresses of the Eldar in Ennor, and unlike the Iathrim, the Exiles did not trust the entirety of their history to oral accounts. The Exiles, as Elrond had learned early on, wrote _everything_ down. ( _Everything_ —Elrond had come across more than a few diaries in his time, and in those diaries, well… There were things that Elrond thought he would have been better off knowing. The erotic fantasies of Edhil who during the Siege of Angband clearly needed a _lot_ more to occupy their time and attention than what they had been given ranked very close to the top of that list—not _quite_ at the top of the list, but still, close.) This had been one of the great fortresses of the Eldar, a place where countless Edhil lived; Elrond doubted that the library, at least during its heyday, had been a poor, meager affair, a place with just a few bookshelves and those half-empty, at that. Whatever the library had been like, it must have been impressive, when it was still in regular use.

Granted, that library probably wasn’t so impressive anymore. Elrond would be shocked if many of the people fleeing the fortress during the Nirnaeth hadn’t thought to take at least one or two books apiece with them as they sped away to parts unknown. It was very like the Ñoldor to cling to knowledge well past the point when others would have deemed it unwise—and it was what _Elrond_ would have done, besides. Get enough people doing that, and even the greatest library in all of Arda would be diminished, and Elrond suspected he would have to give up Ennor completely and go west across the waters to find such a library as that.

Even if most of the bookshelves were not now at least partially empty of books, how well could they possibly have fared, after well over a hundred years without any care given to them, in a place where mold ran rampant? If Elrond did not find the books completely devoured, unsafe even to pick up, let alone try to open just to find that the words had been completely overrun by waves of green and black filth, he thought he was likely also to find in there the Dragon-Helm of Dor-lómin and Glamdring itself. Most likely, any books Elrond found in the library would not be at all worth commenting in his report.

Still, it was worth investigating, at least.

“Is the old library nearby?” Elrond asked Celebrimbor, praying that his face showed neither too-obvious concern over Celebrimbor’s state—not yet, not yet, it didn’t feel like the right time, not yet—nor too-obvious eagerness at the outside hope that he might actually find something within the library that was yet salvageable. The latter impulse especially was likely only to hurt him.

It took a moment for Celebrimbor to respond, though thankfully not a moment that stretched on and on without end, not a moment that Elrond was left to flounder in like a child just learning how to swim. “No, it’s not far.” It was another moment before Celebrimbor’s gaze settled more fixedly on Elrond’s face. “You wish to go there?”

Elrond nodded firmly. “I do.”

“Very well.”

Celebrimbor led him back the way they had come for a bit, down those lightless, humid corridors, before guiding them down a hallway Elrond had not seen before. That, by itself, should not have struck him unduly—he had explored relatively little of the castle thus far, and thus, much of it was nothing he would have recognized. But there was something different about this corridor, lightless as it might have been, just the same as the others. Elrond did not grasp at it at first, but after a long moment of wracking his brains to try to seize upon the right words, he at last realized what it was, the realization enough almost to stop him dead in his tracks.

The air here was significantly drier than it had been in any other portion of the castle Elrond had explored. Even the air in the kitchens could not compare.

It… He knew not nearly enough about architecture to explain how this could be so, but Elrond did know _paper_. Air too dry stood to hurt it, just the same as air too wet would do it harm. But the air here was not so saturated as to feel like a second skin clinging over top of Elrond’s natural skin, a sensation he had been stuck with ever since he had left the kitchens behind him this morning. Hope sparked in Elrond’s mind like the strike of steel against flint. If the air was as dry in the library as it was here, there was hope that perhaps the mold had not spread this far.

 _That still leaves insects and dry rot,_ Elrond reminded himself. Even if he found well-stocked shelves that mold had not touched, that hardly meant that the contents of the library had gone _totally_ unscathed.

But it was something, and it was more than Elrond had expected.

Now, if only…

They were moving upwards, though Elrond only first noticed that when he tripped on a stair. Up a flight of stairs, to the second floor, perhaps? Well, that was reassuring in its own way; if the library was away from the ground floor, it was unlikely to have flooded in case of a truly torrential downpour. At length, though a little longer than Elrond would have expected, the stairs petered out into even ground, and they traversed a few more crossroads and strange curving bends, before Celebrimbor came to a stop, as suddenly as he had come to a stop before the doors of the treasure vaults.

These, at least, were not locked. Elrond would have marked that as a level of foolhardiness that he would not have thought Maedhros capable of—knowledge was power, and everyone knew it to be a power that was dangerous in the wrong hands, _especially_ the Ñoldor—but honestly, if it meant that he did not have to rely on Celebrimbor’s memory still being as strong now as it was when he used this library himself well over a century ago (and it wasn’t like Celebrimbor’s memory had led Elrond wrong yet, but he was just _saying_ ), and could just _go inside_.

Elrond swallowed on a sudden lump in his throat. He did not feel as if he might weep, no, not at all. He was just a little anxious, considering how many stories he had been told over the years of the wonders of lost and forgotten Exilic texts and treatises. How many of his fellow loremasters and loremasters-in-training, at least those who counted themselves as being of the Exiles rather than the Sindar or the Laegrim, had complained without end about all of the knowledge that had been lost without recall when the Rodyn sank Beleriand beneath the surface of the Sea? How many times had _Elrond_ complained about all of that lost knowledge?

Maedhros had not been a loremaster, that was true. But he had still been a great lord of the Eldar in the days when the knowledge of the Exiles was yet largely whole, and if he had been a lord of decent wisdom, he would have kept great stores of lore here, for his own profit as well as for everyone else’s.

Perhaps there was something…

Not that Elrond could _tell_ at first, considering that Celebrimbor pushed the doors open onto complete darkness.

Elrond blinked, staring into the gloom with frank confusion spreading its fingers across his mind. Was this dark hole supposed to be a _library?_ He had only known one true library in his time, it was true, but if anything, the fact that he’d known only the royal library in the capital in Lindon only made more concrete his ideas of what a good library _should_ be. The library in the capital, the one where he had spent countless hours reading and researching and note-taking, was spacious and airy and well-lit with many stained glass windows of beautiful color and design. It was a welcoming space, a space where Elrond had come across many children playing games or trying to skive off on their lessons, regardless of how often the keepers of the library would tell them that the library was for them to _read_ in, rather than play games in or hide in. It was a space that anyone would have been happy to while away the afternoon in, even if they were not terribly fond of books or of reading.

This? This was a dark hole, and Elrond said as much.

Celebrimbor, to Elrond’s surprise (and for more than one reason), responded to this with a laugh. It was not a gentle laugh, not a laugh that particularly fit him, not a laugh that fit a man with such a gentle voice. It was a laugh that Elrond thought would have been more fitting shooting forth from the shiny black beak of a raven, something harsh and croaking and far, far too knowledgeable.

Elrond thought he might have preferred it if Celebrimbor’s malaise had proved too much for him to laugh at all.

“This was by far the greatest library in the east of Beleriand; even Thargelion could not rival it, and Menegroth never even _tried_.” Celebrimbor stared into the darkness and laughed once more, a laugh that managed somehow to be even more terrible than the first. “Maedhros decreed that there were to be no windows. He feared that if a fire spread in this place, windows would provide too-ready a fuel source for the flames. He feared also that too much in the way of light that could not be easily blocked out would damage the paper on which our wisdom was written. Much good might it have done him,” Celebrimbor said, very bitterly, “if he had taken greater heed of this wisdom. Much might now be different.”

To that, Elrond said not one word. He could not find it in himself to say how often he had wished for the same thing. To say it would have let it rip out of him like a knife being ripped out of the belly of its victim. He had no desire to watch his entrails unfurl upon the floor. He had no desire for anything like that at all.

Celebrimbor brandished his lamp and led the way inside. “We did not light this library with torches; that was entirely too much of a fire hazard as well, not one to be borne. My lamp will serve us well here, if the apparatus is still intact.”

What apparatus that was, Celebrimbor did not explain, but he seemed certainly to know what he was doing. As Elrond paused, watching, Celebrimbor strode forward into the gloom, seeming for a moment almost back to himself, though that was only if Elrond managed to ignore the bitterness suddenly rolling off of him in waves. It was as if Celebrimbor had abruptly been replaced by another person—Elrond wondered if his father had ever entertained such near-palpable bitterness as this—and when dealing with a stranger who dripped bitterness from his tongue, he was less than inclined to move too boldly, too much without caution.

 _I can’t believe I actually_ want _him to drop back down into that apathy_.

Perhaps it was just the location. It could well have just been the location, if this had been a place where Celebrimbor spent much of his time. Elrond hoped it was just that.

(There was an intuition in the back of his mind whispering to him that it was. The thought felt as if it had come from outside, and Elrond was not inclined to give it too much of a foothold inside. But he wanted to hope.)

Elrond stayed back, but the light of the lamp spread far, and as Celebrimbor delved deeper into the dark, Elrond saw a strange metal apparatus gleaming in the shadows that gathered around the edges of the light cast by the lamp. It sat on a low dais, which Celebrimbor climbed up with sure steps and swift as well. He took the lamp off of its chain, and set it in the midst of the apparatus, gently brushing away the dust that coated the metal cradle in which he set the lamp.

For a moment, nothing happened, and Elrond could just barely make out Celebrimbor cursing under his breath. (That should have been an encouraging sign. Now, not so much.) But after a moment more and some shuffling noises that Elrond could not make out the source of in the gloom, light flared in the center of the apparatus, far brighter than even that normally put off by the lamp, bright as it was.

And then, light flared elsewhere close by.

For a moment, an impossible moment, Elrond thought that there were more lamps here, lights such as Celebrimbor’s that had somehow gone out and then been brought back to life by the implantation of Celebrimbor’s lamp in the apparatus. But that was not the case. He could hear a faint whirring, most likely from the center of the apparatus, perhaps adjacent to the lamp itself, and as Elrond’s eyes adjusted to the sudden influx of incandescent blue light, he saw that what he had thought were additional lamps were in fact lenses reflecting light and somehow amplifying it, even though Elrond could make out no independent spark of light within the lenses themselves.

One day, he would have to figure out how the apparatus worked. One day, Elrond would allow his curiosity to overwhelm him, and he would pry and pester and _prod_ at Celebrimbor until Celebrimbor finally told him the story of what the apparatus was, exactly, how it had been built, and how it worked. When that day came, Elrond, though he was not an engineer, though he did not concern himself with such things when there was lore and languages and medicine for him, would sit in fascination and listen to Celebrimbor talk, talk and talk and talk, barely registering the fact that Celebrimbor had quickly gone off on a tangent and was talking about something that was only tangentially the point.

In this present moment, the inner workings of the apparatus lighting up the library was _far_ from being Elrond’s biggest concern. Not when he could finally see what that apparatus illuminated.

“It’s dimmer than it should be, thanks to having only one lamp,” Celebrimbor explained. “But the light it gives off should serve for us.”

Himself, Elrond barely heard him.

As he had thought, at least some of the residents had taken the time to come here before fleeing. Some of the books in this library had been carried off long ago to parts unknown, though if Elrond was a betting man (which he was not), he would bet that most, if not all, of these books had since met a fiery or a watery fate. Few of Maedhros’s supporters had lived to see the Second Age, and of those few, Elrond thought they would have found a way to ensure that the knowledge found its way back to the people, even considering the risks of exposing themselves to a world that largely held them to be better off dead and buried in the bygone Age.

Some might have come into this place to carry off precious knowledge before the final evacuation, and that showed in the darkness of empty spots on the shelves, where books—or perhaps scrolls, for the truly _ancient_ texts—should have been. The library was not wholly intact, just as Elrond had thought.

Gleams and glints and _sparkles_ of color, of nearly every hue to be found beneath Anor’s fiery face, shone out of every beam of blue light cast upon the library, and out of the gloom of the shadows just beyond. Elrond tried counting, for a while. He found soon that he had to stop.

The library of Himring Castle was not equal in size to the one found in the capital; the clustering, shifting shadows necessarily skewed Elrond’s perceptions at least somewhat, but he thought that this library might be three-quarters the size of the one he had spent so much time in, reading and researching and note-taking. It was not the open, airy space that Elrond’s own home library was, but what lacked in welcoming, plush-cushioned chairs, it made up for in _books_.

From where Elrond was standing, he could see hundreds, perhaps _thousands_ (he had finally stopped counting around six hundred or so) of books, some standing upright in their shelves, and still more tumbled into the gaps left yawning open by well-intentioned quasi-plunderers. Their leather bindings, some cracked with age, all yet held the brilliant colors of variegated dyes, scarlet and viridian and azure and violet, golden and silver and deepest sable and the fiery ochre of Anor plunging into the western Sea. The Ñoldor had been enamored of writing down every last thought to enter their minds, no matter how inappropriate for public consumption they might have been. They also believed in doing so in _style_ , though Elrond, working mostly with books that had spent entirely too long exposed to sunlight, or had simply had their leather bindings ripped clean off (perhaps they had boiled it; Elrond had had to eat boiled leather once or twice, though he would sooner take even the stalest of hardtack or the saltiest of salted fish over eating boiled leather _ever_ again), but had few opportunities before to drink in too much of these styles.

He was getting that opportunity now. Truth be told, he was getting an eyeful.

As Elrond ventured deeper into the library, eyes wide, mouth agape, mind barely working enough to register such at all, and _certainly_ not working enough to grok the fact that it made him look like a feckless child, he began to see past simple _colors_. The colors were even more vibrant and beautiful up close, but _as_ Elrond drew close, he began to discern the patterns that adorned the leather bindings, some in embroidered thread, some in crumbling paint, some in appliques of leather or cloth, some embossed in precious metals.

Though the Ñoldor were rather less likely to sing the praises of nature than, say, the Laegrim, Elrond saw many patterns of flowers and leaves; one or two books bore on their covers the images of what Elrond could only assume to be Telperion and Laurelin, in gold and, yes, in mithril—silver did not bear such a brilliant shine, especially not after decades of neglect. He marked out roses and mellyrn, blackcurrant and hazelnut and cedar and holly. A few books were decorated with white thread fashioned to resemble niphredil, and here, if only here, Elrond had to look away.

The eight-pointed star of the House of Fëanor was a popular adornment; fitting, considering where they were, though Elrond wondered how well these particular books would be received at court. Elrond spotted also the emblems of House Fingolfin and House Finarfin, which was somewhat less expected, though Elrond supposed in the next moment that they could have been gifts, or purchases, or that they had been on loan at the time of the Nirnaeth, and no one had ever had the chance to return them to their proper owners. The only thing that really ought to shock him would be if he saw a book bearing the emblem of the royal house of Doriath, and no, a cursory glance all around showed Elrond nothing that looked anything like that.

(If Elrond ever did spot anything in this cavernous room bearing the device of the House of Thingol, Elrond reserved the right to claim it for himself. If he could have nothing else of his bloodlines that he actually enjoyed, let him have this at least, _please_.)

There were geometric patterns as well, things that Elrond had seen on the rare occasion that an Exile at court was willing to wear clothing that broadcast the fact that they had lived in the east of Beleriand or had at least _been_ there long enough to pick up clothing or bolts of cloth. He marked out interlocking triangles and hexagons and squares and octagons. No pentagons, though; Elrond had never marked out a pentagon in all the instances he had born witness to. There were many rings here, though, rings that interlocked and overlapped and glinted out of the shadows, for many were done in metallic thread, though there were some who would have argued that that was a pointless frivolity for a book. (Then again, those who considered metallic thread a pointless frivolity for a book never seemed to share that criticism with the books that boasted images of Telperion and Laurelin in precious metals.)

 _Elrond_ did not consider it a pointless frivolity. Books were some of the noblest things in the world. Those who recognized and acknowledged their nobility understood properly the way that books needed to be treated, in order to present their nobility properly to the world. There were some who would never have decorated a book with precious metals or with jewels. If it was up to Elrond, he thought that he would decorate every book so, be it a book that did not have to be carried outside regularly, where the jewels or precious metals decorating the covers might heighten the chance of damaging the book itself. (Though honestly, even Elrond might give the book with all of the author’s erotic thoughts in it a miss with the gemstones. Just… why.) If Edhil did not give him the resources to do this, perhaps the Hadhodrim would be inclined to aid him; they were as enamored as the Exiles of knowledge, and unlike the Sindar and the Laegrim were perfectly happy to put jewels on every last thing they owned that it was at all practical (or even just stopping at _mildly_ impractical) to put jewels on.

How many different topics must these books cover? There must be books of poetry and philosophy, of medicine and herb-lore, of linguistics and culture and diplomacy and warfare and mathematics and genealogy and every topic under the light of Anor. How many _novels_ must be here, novels of which there had only been a few copies ever present in Beleriand, novels whom many of those interested in the topic, Elrond not least among them, had believed lost forever. Whole authorial legacies could be contained entirely within the confines of this room.

Elrond was standing in a place that, if you asked _him_ , contained treasures more valuable than even the mithril that he had found in the treasure vaults. There was only one thing to do.

“Shall we get started?” Elrond asked, more brightly than he had felt in days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Aran Einior** —Manwë
> 
>  **Anor** —the Sindarin name for the Sun  
>  **Edhel** —Elf (plural: Edhil) (Sindarin)  
>  **Edhil** —Elves (singular: Edhel) (Sindarin)  
>  **Eldar** —‘People of the Stars’ (Quenya); a name first given to the Elves by Oromë when he found them by Cuiviénen, but later came to refer only to those who answered the summons to Aman and set out on the March, with those who chose to remain by Cuiviénen coming to be known as the Avari; the Eldar were composed of these groups: the Vanyar, Ñoldor (those among them who chose to go to Aman), and the Teleri (including their divisions: the Lindar, Falmari, Sindar and Nandor).  
>  **Ennor** —Middle-Earth (Sindarin)  
>  **Hadhodrim** —a Sindarin name for the Dwarves, ultimately adapted from the Khuzdul Khazâd (singular: Hadhod) (Sindarin)  
>  **Iathrim** —the Sindar of Doriath  
>  **Laegrim** —the Green-Elves of Ossiriand (singular: Laegel) (plural: Laegil; Laegrim is class-plural term); the division of the Nandor who followed Denethor, son of Lenwë; the name was imposed upon them by the Sindar, because of the lush forests of their land, because of their especial love for the forests and waters of their land, and because the Laegrim often dressed in green as camouflage  
>  **Lindórinand** —‘Vale of the Land of Singers’ (Nandorin); one of the original names given to Lothlórien by its first, Nandorin inhabitants.  
>  **Lisgardh** —A marshy region by the Mouths of Sirion, a land of reeds that grow man-high and dense as a forest. Its name in earlier drafts was ‘Arlisgion,’ translated in The Book of Lost Tales 2 as “the place of reeds” (155).  
>  **Mellyrn** —Mallorn trees (singular: mallorn) (Sindarin). A tree which reaches massive heights, in appearance somewhat reminiscent of a beech tree. The malinornë has a trunk with smooth, silver bark; its leaves are in summer pale green above and silver below; in the autumn the leaves turn to pale gold rather than falling. The leaves instead fall in spring when the tree flowers; the flowers are golden blossoms that cluster like a cherry tree’s.  
>  **Niphredil** —‘Little pallor’ (Sindarin); a white flower that bloomed first in Doriath when Lúthien was born. It also grew in Lothlórien, on Cerin Amroth. In appearance it was similar to a snowdrop.  
>  **Rodyn** —Valar (singular: Rodon) (Sindarin): a common Sindarin name for the Valar


	17. Chapter Seventeen

That Elrond must still use Celebrimbor to dictate his notes for him was something that no longer felt quite like the humiliation it had when he had first approached Celebrimbor with such a request in the treasure vaults. It was not at all what Elrond would have felt ideal, considering that in such a place as _this_ , he would have much rather had complete freedom of movement, not having to account for the man following after him, recording his notes for him, but things being what they were, Elrond thought he could tolerate it. When he was in a place such as this library, digging through the truest treasure trove he had ever seen in his life, there was quite a lot that he could tolerate, that he would never have before believed himself capable of tolerating.

And Elrond did make sure to arrange things in such a way that he could get some quick notes taken down, and then have as much time as he pleased with the books. He pulled off ten books from the shelves, those with covers that, though no longer supple (he doubted there was a single leather cover in this entire library that was yet supple, after so long without care), were not so brittle that Elrond risked causing them irreparable damage from anything resembling careless handling. Given that his right hand was _still_ not behaving as it ought, careless handling seemed less like an outside possibility than it might have the day before. Elrond was not entirely certain that his spirit would not crumble like the leather, if he had to watch it fall to pieces on the floor. Best to avoid it.

At least he did not have to put the books on the _floor_. The bookshelves were made of stone, explaining why they had not rotted, or even taken any damage, from the long decades of being left uncared-for in the dark. The tables in the library were also made of stone, and there were several stone benches set up around them. It would certainly not be _comfortable,_ sitting on them, but Elrond had no reason to fear that his seat would rot out from under him as he read.

Celebrimbor made no protest as he took down a swift, cursory amount of notes (Elrond knew that the books, however great a value they might hold to _him_ and his fellow loremasters and loremasters-in-training, would not hold as much import to those who would have the most influence on whether there were to be any future expeditions to Tol Himling) on the books that Elrond had selected. The bitterness that had so suddenly swept over him when they had first come into the library did not show itself to Elrond at this moment, though Elrond wondered if it even _could_ show itself, when Celebrimbor did not open his mouth to speak. Celebrimbor did not hold his bitterness in his eyes, or his jaw, or his hands. It had poured out past his lips, and seemed unable to escape him any other way.

Not that it was not there. Elrond was hardly willing to credit that the bitterness had left Celebrimbor behind. He knew his own bitterness, knew how it clung to him beyond all hope or grief, and could not imagine that it would not cling to others just the same as it clung to him. And Celebrimbor certainly had plenty to be bitter about; anyone who evaluated him with even the slightest pretense at impartiality would know just what Celebrimbor had to be bitter about, and would grasp that he had better cause than most to be far more bitter than most. That he rarely let it show at his eyes or his jaw or his hands or his mouth spoke only to his control.

(Perhaps that was what he had wanted to speak of, all this time, what he had sought a reflection for in Elrond’s eyes and jaw and hands and mouth. We do not, after all, fare very well when we allow our bitterness to fester inside us. Elrond knew that, and he thought he might know it better than most. But neither did he particularly care for the idea of his bitterness being drawn from him without his input. It was… It was close to the surface. Sometimes, it was very close to the surface. Sometimes, it was so close to the surface that Elrond thought that if he gave it even the slightest amount of ground within him, it would come rushing forth in a torrent that would drown him and leave nothing but the bitterness behind.

He did not want to be a husk hollowed out by his own bitterness. He did not want to be put in that state by another’s prodding. Even when Elrond wished to find someone to speak of his bitterness with, even when he wished to seek a reflection, he did not want for someone else to come to him and try to draw it out of him. Touch him not, and leave him with control over his own mind, his own heart, his own feelings.)

Elrond could not guess at the exact state of Celebrimbor’s bitterness, beyond the certainty that it was not dead within him. As long as Celebrimbor chose not to let it show again, chose not to let it spread from his mouth to his eyes, to his jaw, to his hands, Elrond was content to let it sit within him, uncommented on.

No, not content. That wasn’t the word for it. ‘Content’ was not the word for what Elrond felt, as he let Celebrimbor’s bitterness do as it would, so long as it did not confront him directly once more. What he was feeling was something he did not have a name for, not really. It was something less than contentment. Where contentment was warm within him, this was not warm and not cold, but marked only by its lack of characteristics, where heat and cold were concerned. It was something that he thought could take on sickly heat or swooning cold in a heartbeat, but for now, sat supine within him, waiting for the opportunity.

‘Content’ was not the word, and Elrond would just have to go on without knowing what it was that he was feeling, at the idea of something that was lurking out of his sight, but certainly not dead. For now, so long as the work was being done and done properly, so long as Celebrimbor was doing properly what Elrond presently could not do at all, the ambiguity mattered somewhat less to him than it otherwise would have. (It still _mattered_. It just mattered _less_.)

Elrond called out what he wished to have in his report—the title and author, if such was present, the decorations on the front cover (he could claim that this was purely to make quick identification easier in the future, but perhaps there _was_ a part of him that hoped to appeal to the treasure hunters; he could only hope that they would not go so far as to rip the gold and silver and mithril and gems off of the books that possessed them, considering the irreparable damage that could do), a quick summary of the topic of the book, and the general state of repair or disrepair that the book was in. Celebrimbor wrote silently, without comment or complaint. Elrond… did watch him, did look for any signs of bitterness surfacing somewhere Elrond would not have been able to ignore it, would not have been able to avoid commenting upon it. Celebrimbor never gave him that. Elrond could not decide whether to be relieved or annoyed. (Could not decide whether to be embarrassed that he couldn’t find it in him to speak with concern, even if the cause of his concern was not present before him.)

Elrond did not keep Celebrimbor writing for very long, in any event. Even if Elrond had had the use of his right hand, _he_ would not have kept himself writing for very long. How could you write of books, when a book’s chief purpose was to be _read_?

No, the chief allure of books was calling for Elrond too strongly for him to resist it overlong—not that he was trying very hard, anyways. Soon enough, Elrond declared his note-taking for this trip—for there _would_ be other trips; how could he so much as feign otherwise, now that he knew what waited for him within a dark, cavernous chamber atop Tol Himling?—complete, releasing Celebrimbor from his duties, self-accepted or not, to do whatever he would while Elrond read.

…You know, Elrond would really have expected Celebrimbor to pick up some books of his own to read while Elrond occupied himself. Celebrimbor had, over and over again, proved himself every bit as bookish as Elrond, and on top of that, Celebrimbor had had the use of this library, once upon a time. There must have been countless volumes here that he had read and enjoyed, that he had no doubt missed dearly after the Bragollach burned up Beleriand and Celebrimbor was never able to make his way back here again. Surely, when presented with the chance to reacquaint himself…

Before you ask, Elrond had hardly _forgotten_ Celebrimbor’s malaise, or the bright, taut thing that had come to sit beside it in the latter part of their excursion into the treasure vaults, and to forget the bitterness would have been like forgetting his own skin, impossible and foolish. He knew that such things could work on a man, could turn their minds and their hearts away from that which they loved. But Elrond knew also the power of a library, at least as he had always felt it: the power to heal all hurts, at least for as long as you lingered within a library’s walls, and the power to make you forget all of your troubles, at least as for long as you kept on drinking in the endless sea of words that the library had to offer you.

Elrond knew that power. He could not imagine that Celebrimbor did not know it as well, for the power of the library within its own domain was of such a vigor that Elrond could not envision a world where it was not immediately apparent to all who wandered into its domain. He would have expected that Celebrimbor would have sought out the balm that power provided, an ease to whatever it was that ailed him.

Celebrimbor never selected a book to read. He never ventured closer to any of the racks of bookshelves then perhaps ten feet. He stared about him as if lost, his arms locked down at his side.

Elrond hated that his first instinct, one he had drank in the sight, was to hasten to find some way to soothe. The impulse had come from nowhere (or, so he assumed), the cousin, if not the brother, of another impulse that had come to him from nowhere as a child. That impulse had shown itself most often in him staring down at a fallen Orc or Man that he had just stabbed, and fighting the urge to step forward and help them up—even the ones yet slashing weakly at his ankles. It made no sense, it made absolutely _no_ sense, and while this present form was not as destructive as the past’s would have been, had Elrond ever acted on it, it still felt like stretching his hand out entirely too far for his own safety.

When Celebrimbor at last deigned to speak to him of his troubles, then, _then_ , Elrond’s impulse could find an appropriate outlet. Until that moment arrived, all this was was supposition, and supposition inclined to lean back and bite him, at that. That in mind, Elrond set to quashing it into silence.

…He couldn’t.

…He couldn’t do that as a child, either.

The books. The books were calling him. They would do what Elrond, on his own, could not. Perhaps, they would be enough even to put aside his worries regarding his hand, for a time. He spared one last long, ginger look at Celebrimbor, before diving in.

The first book Elrond selected off of the pile was bound entirely in leather, with no metal or jewels to be found anywhere, but it was held shut by a strap of leather bands woven into an intricate knot. Thankfully, Elrond did _not_ have to undo the knot in order to open the book, or else he might have been here all day. The knot was part of the strap that hid the little stone buckle behind it, presumably for decorative purposes. Elrond ran his finger over the rough stone buckle, pursing his lips. This was probably not a book either made or commissioned by someone with much in the way of personal wealth. That such a book as that could exist here was, Elrond thought, an encouraging sign. There had been times and places when the making of books was the province solely of the wealthy—right now, in Lindon, it could be hard for someone without much money to rake together the coin required to commission a book, unless they could find some way to prevail upon the sympathies of the publishers and the bookbinders to get a reduced price.

But here was a book that had likely not been the product of great wealth, and come out of a time and place where money would likely have been deemed better spent elsewhere. Elrond… He’d not thought that Maedhros would allow such a thing, when he paused to devote any thought to it at all. Maedhros had never seemed like the sort of person that would allow money that could have been spent on the defense of the north to be to be spent instead on what many would have considered frivolities. Maedhros had seemed very much like the sort of person who would have told his people that they must give up certain pleasures of theirs, in the interest of keeping the north of Ennor safe for those who must live in it after the endless wars were finally concluded. Maedhros was absolutely the sort of person who would have given up those ‘certain pleasures’ himself, perhaps given up more than that which he had asked his people to give up.

When Elrond thought about it, he really had expected to find Himring Castle such an austere place, and every last bit of evidence he had found that that was not what the castle had been at all had just been one shock after another, each greater than the last, for it carried the fibers of the last one with it. He had expected to find, really, a fortress on a larger scale than Amon Ereb, but something that bore the same atmosphere, something that labored under the weight of the same miasma of bleak, grim despair.

And yet, there had been the tapestries in the entrance hall. And yet, there had been that fountain in the courtyard. And yet, there had been the splendor in the treasure vault. And yet, there was this book.

_I should really put all of my surprise aside. I should really just put aside every last assumption I have made about this place._

Elrond could not quite find the way to do that, could not quite find the proper thread to pull on to excise it from his body and his mind. There was something else attached to it, something that weighted the end of the threads like a millstone. The weight was… familiar. Yes, it was familiar, and its familiarity was such that Elrond wished to examine it no longer.

Enough dawdling. The book waited for him.

Gingerly (even if the leather was not crumbling under his hands, it was still not _nearly_ as supple as it must have been well over a hundred years ago when these books were still kept and cared for, and who even knew what state the paper or parchment or whatever had been used for pages was in), Elrond undid the buckle and opened the front cover of the book.

He had chosen a well-lit table, close enough to the apparatus that the light was at times almost uncomfortable to him. Elrond had anticipated that there would perhaps be some difficulty reading, due either to faded ink, or to the fact that the handwriting in some of the books, if handwritten they were, would be a little difficult for him to decipher—Elrond liked to think of himself as a man who had the skill and the patience to tease out the meanings behind somewhat messy handwriting, but he had come upon true chicken-scratch often enough not to let his ambition overshoot his aim in this regard (Well, not too often, anyways).

 _It would be truly wretched,_ he thought wryly, though there was more bitterness than humor in the thought, _if I came all this way to find that all of the books in this library, untouched by mold or dry rot or fire, were taken down by writers with such horrible handwriting that I could not read a word of it._

But let us not pay heed to such fears.

When Elrond focused his gaze upon the first page of the book, he found to his relief that the ink, while he did not think it was quite as dark and strong as it had been when it was first written down, was still vivid enough to make itself clearly visible upon the page. He subsequently found to his increased relief that the handwriting—a handwritten book; perhaps the only fees on the writer’s part had been those to ensure that the book would be properly bound?—was not only legible, but neat and expert Sindarin. The dialect was of the Mithrim, rather than the Iathrim, and that was not the most comfortable choice for someone who had been taught perfect court Iathrim Sindarin from his cradle, and who _had_ grown up surrounded by those who spoke Mithrim Sindarin, but who had always felt as if he was internally translating the grammatical differences and the loanwords from Quenya and the words that just had no equivalent in Quenya or in any dialect of Sindarin other than Mithrim Sindarin itself. Elrond had always felt as if he was internally translating Mithrim Sindarin, rather than simply, uncomplicatedly _listening_ to it, and even when addressed in Mithrim Sindarin, he had responded to the speaker in Iathrim Sindarin.

(He supposed that there were those who thought that his clinging to Iathrim Sindarin meant that he, like his forefather, bore some hostility or suspicion towards those Sindar who had come from the lands around Lake Mithrim. Elrond… He would really rather those who thought that _not_ think that. After every last thing that had happened, there were many concepts that Elrond thought better off left to die in the First Age, and the idea that mere proximity to Angband could be corrupting was not least among them. Just… why? How had that idea even taken root? Who had first decided that that was something that could actually be plausible, and on what grounds, exactly? They couldn’t possibly have been _steady_ grounds, but Elrond would still have liked to know. Who had first decided that this was plausible, and how had they convinced the others? As far as Elrond knew—though given how many people just talked _around_ the issue, rather than directly addressing the issue—it wasn’t Thingol, at least not this time. Someone had put the idea in his head before he could popularize it. Who? Who was responsible for this? And did they understand the sort of interrogation that they were in for if Elrond got his hands on them?

To be brief: no, Elrond’s avoidance of using Mithrim Sindarin in speech was not supposed to be any endorsement of the frankly bizarre attitude that mere proximity to Angband had corrupted the Mithrim Sindar. He would appreciate it if anyone who thought that it was anything resembling endorsement would _stop_ thinking that, and the sooner, the better. He just had never had the ease with the dialect that he had with Iathrim Sindarin. Hopefully, time would give him the ease he sought.)

It was Mithrim Sindarin, but it had been written neatly, and the further Elrond read, the more he would find that it had been written by someone, though he knew not who, of greater than average education and intelligence. There was still some element of internal translation involved, but it was not something that hindered him enough to make him want to put the book aside in frustration.

The book was a travel log by a trader—Elrond knew not who, for the writer had not written down their name below the title and written-out purpose of the book, and he would wonder later just what the significance of that was, for he could not imagine a trader who would not want potential clients or patrons to know just how well-traveled and, by extension, world-wise and sophisticated that they were—who had been well-traveled in Beleriand and beyond. Elrond had not been aware of the state of trade between Beleriand and the world to the south and the east of it during the First Age, beyond the fact that there must have been _some_ trade between Beleriand and Edhellond far to the south. This would all be new information to him.

He couldn’t read the book in its entirety while he was here, of course. He did not have time for that, of course. There were other things that Elrond needed to do while he was here on Tol Himling, of course.

Of course, of course, of course. Elrond stared in frustration down at the travel log, and then he took the time to wonder to himself if he was going to be staring in similar levels of frustration at the other nine books that he had pulled out from their resting places. If there was nothing else, he did not want to go through this process of temptation and frustration ten times over. Better to rein it all in now.

_I’ll just flip through it. I’ll just flip through it quickly, and move on to the others. Perhaps I’ll take one back to the kitchen with me tonight to read, but I cannot spend all of my time here._

Elrond began to read.

And read.

And read.

And cursed his own lack of resolve the entire way.

But it was so _interesting_ , especially to someone who would have liked to be able to travel much, much more than he was currently allowed. This trader had been to every corner of Beleriand where it was safe for Edhil to travel, barring Doriath, and Elrond could not decide if that signified that the trader was an Exile, or if they were simply a Sinda who, thanks to their association with the lord of Himring, eldest son of Fëanor and a detested Kinslayer in the eyes of Elu Thingol, might not have thought twice of pushing forward into Thingol’s domain, even if there was plenty of trade to be found there. Even a cursory examination of the book revealed details about places like the Havens of the Falas and Estolad that Elrond had never before heard, things he was uncertain he would have ever heard if he had _not_ had the opportunity to peruse this book. The temptation to just read it from cover to cover, heedless of the amount of time it would take to do so, was so powerful that it nearly overwhelmed him, nearly put all thought of food and sleep out of Elrond’s mind, until he shifted his weight slightly and the sensation of sitting on an unforgiving stone bench shot its way to the forefront of his mind.

And that was only what the trader had written of the places _within_ Beleriand that they had traveled to. For as the description they had written down on the first page of the book illustrated, the trader had also traveled _outside_ of Beleriand, and they had included a wealth of details on those far-off lands as well.

Edhellond, to start with. That was the automatic assumption, and the trader bore it out. They had gone to Lindórinand, too, when it was yet sparsely populated and solely by shy and suspicious Nandor. And there were all the places _between_ Beleriand and Edhellond and Lindórinand to consider, as well—all those rarely traveled, poorly described roads and towns and villages and _lands_ that Elrond knew relatively little about, even after coming to live in Lindon. There was a chance, at least there was one _here_ , that he could become better-acquainted with the misty lands between Lindon and its primary trading partners without even having to travel down those roads himself. Oh, Elrond would still _like_ to travel them, but the idea having it all to know beforehand, of knowing that there would be no nasty surprises lying in wait for him once he finally had the leave to travel down them himself, presented a powerful allure. How was he supposed to resist it?

So perhaps Elrond spent just a little more time than he ought to have reading this book in particular. He hardly saw how anyone could _blame_ him.

But Elrond did remember himself, did eventually manage to wrest his gaze from the pages and set the book aside. The next book was crusted in little chips of amethyst, and it had begun to twinkle like the stars set in the night sky, beautiful and arresting. And… And there was something else, though Elrond was loath to acknowledge it. Some bitter spike in his stomach that rose at the thought of reading the words of someone who had been so well-traveled. The book was written in the first-person, so it was hardly as if he could have easily prevented himself from falling into identifying strongly with the writer, especially not when their own writing style was so immersive.

Someone had written this travel log. Someone who was now dead. Oh, perhaps they lived still, but Elrond rather doubted it. Such a well-traveled trader would have had some cachet in the capital, even if their former loyalties were to the House of Fëanor, and Elrond had never heard of their like. It was hardly the first time Elrond had read the words of someone now dead, but it was difficult to escape the fact that it was the first time he had read the words of someone who was now dead, when those words fought tooth and nail to immerse him in the emotions and the sensations of their author.

So yes, at length, Elrond could set the book aside. He would try to forget, later, what it was that had finally did it.

And so, on and on it went. The book crusted with amethyst crystals turned out to be a compendium on minerals (Elrond thought that whoever had put the amethyst crystals on the book in the first place had overlooked a golden opportunity; why not decorate the covers of the book with shards of gemstones of all kinds? Opals weren’t the best stone, considering their eccentricities, and rose quartz was so brittle, but Elrond knew of no other problems, at least not off the top of his head, that would disqualify the others). The subject matter was considerably drier than the travel log, though the book also included illustrations, beautifully rendered in ink and paint that had faded somewhat with time, but that served only to infuse the illustrations with a delicacy that Elrond was not certain they would otherwise have possessed.

There was a book of maps of the lands of Beleriand, _illustrated_ maps, that charted far smaller areas than Elrond had ever seen on any other maps of the mostly-drowned continent. There was a book that dealt on the medical care of many of the animals that you would have found in or around a castle such as this, horses and cats and dogs and pigeons and ravens, cows and sheep and goats and chickens. There was a book that dealt with the medicinal _and_ the poisonous properties of flowers in the north of Ennor. There was indeed a _novel_ among the selection of books that Elrond had picked out, and though the subject matter was not really for him, its mere presence here was an encouraging sign, a sign that this was a place where creativity had once flourished, and that there was still some blood in the old beast yet, blood that could share its vitality with the survivors.

On and on it went, as Elrond flipped through the books. Some were relatively easy to set aside, for reasons ranging from lack of interest to something close to disgust. Some, Elrond had a hard time remembering were not glued to his hand, for the power that they exerted over him. It was what he had expected from a library, and thus, he was hardly disappointed. A library was not truly a library unless you felt some force exerting its power on you, distorting time and trying its best to make you forget that you have other places to be.

And then, there was the book down at the bottom of the pile.

Elrond had selected it almost as an afterthought, out of the vague thought that ten would be a nice, round number, which he thought might have been some Mannish influence talking, for would not _twelve_ be better? But for whatever reason regarding the number, Elrond had found nine books that immediately drew the eye, for one reason or another, and then he had just set his hand on a slender little volume drowning in shadow, that Elrond would never have expected to find, had he note felt leather where his skin should have brushed against cool stone.

The book, bound with leather a deep, deep black, did not seem to have fared quite so well as the others. It had clearly once possessed painted decorations on its front cover, but that paint had been reduced to scattered golden flecks unable to even hint at the shapes that had once been present. It was held shut with what would once have been an intricate iron lock, but had since been so badly eaten away with rust that the lock presented no difficulty to Elrond, even when he possessed the use of only one of his hands. He soon had the lock, now broken into several pieces, set aside, and the book sitting open before him.

Actually…

Actually, Elrond did not think that this was one of the books he had dictated notes about. He cast a long look at the pile he had just discarded, frowning deeply, and his frown only deepened even more when he had finished counting.

Eleven. Counting the one he had sitting out before him, he had eleven.

How exactly had he lost count? Elrond stroked the edge of the front cover with his fingertips, caught between a strain of worry and questioning why he should be worried in the first place, this was a library, and it would hardly be the first time he had ever lost count of the number of books he was taking off of the shelves to read or consult when he was in a library. (Elrond inspired rather mixed emotions in the librarians he had known. He knew that they bore a healthy respect for his devotion to what they had in their care. He knew also that they had something much closer to loathing for the fact that he could, and often did, go to several different sections of the library, pull out books from all of them, assemble those books in a pile, and then forget where some or all of them needed to go once he was done with them. Sometimes, Elrond thought that he had been given checkout privileges purely so that the librarians could go longer amounts of time without having to clean up after him.) Surely, this was just more of the same of what he had experienced so many other times before.

It was not something that Elrond needed to concern himself with. Accident and coincidence would explain it simply enough. He should not let it keep him from the book itself.

The book was expert enough in keeping him from the words it contained.

That the book was so much more visibly worn than the others that Elrond had taken down for closer examination did give him an idea that it might be older than the other ten—much older, perhaps. He could be holding a relic from Valinor itself, though Elrond would have thought that a book that had come straight from that exalted realm would have been finer even than the finest books of the Exiles in Beleriand. (Perhaps it was that even in Valinor, Edhil without much in the way of personal wealth had a hard time getting a book published.) With that in mind, Elrond supposed that the ink might be rather faded, might present more difficulties for a reader than the other books had done. If it had been written in Valinor, it would most likely be in Quenya (not likely to be in Quendya or Telerin, considering the way that the Exiles’ relationship with both the Vanyar and the Falmari had ended), and Elrond had more ease with Quenya than he did with Mithrim Sindarin, yes, but there were still the reservations that were rooted ( _hooked_ ) too deeply in his mind for him to ever have _true_ ease with the language (Or so he thought).

There were many reasons that Elrond might not have the ease with this book that he had had with the others. What he had _not_ been expecting was that the ink would be so badly faded in some places that he could barely guess that there had ever been words on the pages at all. What he had very much _not_ been expecting was the blots and slashes of black ink over other passages, effectively obliterating any words that might still have been made of ink dark enough to read out of existence.

A blistering tongue of anger lashed in Elrond’s stomach as he stared at the violence done to the story the writer of this book might once have been able to tell, and would never be able to tell now. Who would do something like this to a book? Who would mutilate a book thusly, injuring the writer and denying the readers what was their eternal right of a book? Who would be so impudent, so brazen, so heartless?

Alas, the abuser of this book was likely in the same condition as its original author—dead, and lingering on the opposite side of a Sea Elrond had no intention of ever crossing. Elrond could not mete out justice, if he was indeed the appropriate person to be meting out justice against the abuser of a book. Elrond would have to put aside such thoughts for now, useless as they were, unlikely as they were to do anything but stoke anger to a hotter and hotter burn, and accordingly sap his concentration until there was nothing left at all but a charred and brittle seed. There was something left that he could pore over, even if the full story of this book was forever lost to him. Best to focus on that.

Not that there was much left behind at all. The language of the book was indeed Quenya, and when there was enough ink left on the page, Elrond discerned a spiky, delicately-stylized handwriting that felt vaguely familiar to him, though he knew not why. (Was trying not to know why, perhaps.) But it was a very strict, conservative dialect of Quenya, at least what little he could make out (this, too, was familiar, and Elrond held the word ‘coincidence’ close against his heart), and not the dialect, Gondolindrim Quenya (which was much more of an amalgamation of Quenya and Sindarin than the other dialects of Quenya that had cropped up in Beleriand), that Elrond was most familiar with. Even if he had had the whole book to read, in ink that was not faded, he had the feeling that there would have been enough internal translation going on that it would have slowed him down considerably.

Elrond’s brow furrowed as he pored over the book. The blots and slashes of fresher ink were extensive, obliterating much of the book, but those sections which were still at least somewhat visible were… Honestly, they raised more questions than they answered.

What little he could read seemed to be instructions of some kind, an alchemical formula, if Elrond was to guess. What exactly it was that the formula was supposed to accomplish, he could not guess; so much of the section dealing with the formula itself was so badly defaced that it had taken some doing to realize that it _was_ a formula at all. Molten mithril was one of the ingredients, and adamant was another, and that was all that Elrond could tell of it.

There were preceding sections that Elrond thought must have been of failed attempts with failed formulae, though again, it was hard to tell, when the defacement was so extensive. Interspersed between were diagrams that, honestly, did not make any sense to Elrond at all. He was no student of alchemy—it had interested him briefly as a child, but lack of access to teachers and materials had forced him to quash that interest before it could grow into anything like love—and alchemical diagrams were somewhat obscure to him at the best of times, but this was _highly_ obscure, far beyond his own limited capacity to understand.

Elrond could make out the symbol for Anor and Ithil intertwined, something that Elrond thought typically signified an eclipse, though he understood that for older texts, written just after the Exiles had made their way to Beleriand, the symbol for Anor and Ithil could also stand for the light of the Trees remembered. That much, he recognized and understood, and no more. As he said, he had quashed his nascent interest in alchemy early on in childhood when it became clear that there would be no avenue by which he could pursue the interest. And even after he had come to Lindon, when theoretically he could have pursued the interest in alchemy if he so pleased, nurtured it again and pursued alchemy instead of lore, the inclination just had not been within him. The idea of lore had sunk its hooks down deep within him, and alchemy had seemed…

Elrond did not know just what it had seemed. Like a relic of a bygone Age, perhaps, like something that was better off dead and buried beneath the waves, where nearly all else of Beleriand had been buried. Like one of the many bloodied shadows he dragged behind him, perhaps, and therefore something he was just better off forgetting, even if his memory was such that he could never forget, not properly. Or perhaps it was because Elros had been interested as well, if not as strongly as Elrond had been, and Elros had gone away, and was unavailable to learn the art alongside him.

For whatever reason, even after Elrond had come into a position where he could have pursued the study of alchemy, if he so chose, he had not chosen such. Now, he pursued the path of the loremaster, and the path of the alchemist was consigned to the distant future, perhaps, if his heart changed towards it, perhaps. Elrond knew little of the art, and though he recognized the symbol of Anor and Ithil intertwined, he did not recognize any of the other symbols illustrated here. You might as well have set before him a text written in the dialects of those Men who had never interacted with the Edhil in any capacity, for all that Elrond was going to be able to understand. The fact that the ink was so faint in some places as to be visible only when he held the book very close to his face and squinted did not help at _all_.

There was something here. Elrond could not guess at just what, but there was something here. The lock, the book’s place on the shelves, down in a dark corner where it was unlikely to be happened upon by a casual library-goer, the conservative dialect of Quenya, and the sheer extent of the defacements to the book, whoever it was that had been responsible for them, there was something to that.

(Elrond began to entertain the possibility that it could have been the writer themselves who had defaced the book. He had a hard time believing that, though his own personal biases might be skewing his perceptions at least somewhat towards the refusal. If _Elrond_ was in possession of a book that he himself had written, he would never have taken a pen and ink to it in such a violent fashion. But then, Elrond had never written a book—he’d not even kept a diary as a child, and even if he’d had a blank journal available to him, he probably still would not have kept one—and there had been plenty of thoughts that had clutched at his mind that he would have liked to excise from all existence.)

There was something here, and Elrond could not begin to guess at what. But he thought, biting his lip, stroking the worn vellum page the book was open to with one hand—but of course he was using one hand, he wouldn’t have been able to _feel_ anything if he had been using his right, would not have been able to feel anything of the vellum, so worn that it was as soft as cloth under Elrond’s hand, soft as cloth so sheer and so aged that Elrond would have had good cause to fear that it would crumble if he touched it too harshly—that he might have found a book he wanted to take back to the kitchens to examine more than the travel log.

He sighed, tapped his finger against the table, and stowed the book in his bag.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Anor** —the Sindarin name for the Sun  
>  **Edhil** —Elves (singular: Edhel) (Sindarin)  
>  **Ennor** —Middle-Earth (Sindarin)  
>  **Falmari** —those among the Teleri who completed the journey to Aman; the name is derived from the Quenya falma, '[crested] wave.'  
>  **Iathrim** —the Sindar of Doriath  
>  **Ithil** —the Sindarin name for the Moon; of the Sun and the Moon, it is the elder of the two vessels, lit by Telperion’s last flower; in an early version of ‘Of the Sun and Moon and the Hiding of Valinor’ was said to be “the giver of visions” (The Lost Road 264). As this form is very similar to ‘Isil’, the Quenya form (which is likely to be its original form, as the vessel of the Moon was made in Aman), it is likely that ‘Ithil’ was adapted from ‘Isil’; all I can suppose is that the Valar got in contact with Melian at some point during the First Age to share information.  
>  **Lindórinand** —‘Vale of the Land of Singers’ (Nandorin); one of the original names given to Lothlórien by its first, Nandorin inhabitants.  
>  **Quendya** —Quendya, known also as Vanyarin Quenya, is the dialect of Quenya spoken by the Vanyar of Aman. The Quenya spoken by the Vanyar and the Ñoldor broke off into two different dialects after the Vanyar largely forsook Tirion to live closer to the Valar. Quendya was the more conservative of the two dialects, more resistant to change and evolution, and contained more loanwords from Valarin than the Quenya spoken by the Ñoldor.


	18. Chapter Eighteen

Eventually, Elrond and Celebrimbor were obliged to budge from the library, though Elrond would have rather he never had to leave (at least not until he had read every last book in this place that was still in a condition that allowed for reading), and Celebrimbor did not, after a while, seem aware of himself enough even to be aware of the passage of time, and the effects it could have on the body of an Edhel when not combined with proper care. For Elrond, it was his stomach sounding the call for supper—his stomach was not what Elrond would call intelligent, for it grumbled and groaned as if there was a _proper_ supper waiting for Elrond, and not just another barely-meal of travel rations, which by now were, while not stale or spoiled, not exactly as fresh as they had been when he had set out on the road and they had yet to be subject to the conditions that he had journeyed through. For Celebrimbor, it was Elrond calling out that they should head back to the outside, before it got too dark and they would need the lamp to see by every last place that they went.

Elrond spared one last, longing look at the books that had been left untouched—hundreds or thousands of them, with him the first person to so much as touch them in more than a century, let alone _read_ them; it felt almost like sacrilege to leave them unattended yet again—before Celebrimbor removed his lamp from the apparatus, plunging the library into darkness once more, and they left this place behind them. His bag had a new weight in it, from the strange little alchemical book Elrond had found earlier. Whether or not any further inspection of it would prove enlightening, he could not say—though he could _guess_ , and that guess was not inclining him towards optimism. Most likely, it would be something to stare fruitlessly at before he went to sleep, the frustration exhausting him enough that he would not notice the hard earth beneath his thin layers of barely-bedding, maybe enough that he would be able to overlook the fact that his bedding was still damp, if he did _indeed_ find it still damp.

Celebrimbor, Elrond had the impression, would just leave him to it. Celebrimbor, he had needed to call out to three times before he heard Elrond calling. Celebrimbor seemed occupied by enough that whatever Elrond was doing, it would take some effort for him even to notice it, let alone rouse himself enough to _ask_ after it.

When they reached the courtyard where they had taken their breakfast, the sky was tinted a gold that Elrond rarely saw outside of citrines (He… he just wasn’t even going to try to fight it anymore). At some point during the day, when they had been too deep in the castle to notice, the rain had finally stopped, though that citrine sky was in certain places, and after certain movements of a still-vigorous wind, barely visible for all of the coal-gray storm clouds still swirling about. The air was fragrant with the smell of rain. If it did not start raining again before the morning came, Elrond would be shocked.

(A note for future expeditions: perhaps schedule them for times of year when thunderstorms off the coast are perhaps just a _little_ less likely to crop up and force all explorers into the confines of the castle, with no chance to walk around outside during the daylight hours.)

They ate in silence, though after all of those hours—if they _were_ hours—that they had spent in the library, Elrond was hardly expecting anything _besides_ silence. Hardly expecting it, and honestly kind of welcoming of it, considering what Elrond _had_ encountered from Celebrimbor in the library. All of that bitterness had come pouring out through Celebrimbor’s mouth. He knew not yet how best to respond to it. He knew not yet whether he should respond to it at all, at least not while they were still here, in a place where there were ample causes for bitterness and ample means of amplifying it.

And his confidence as to whether he should wait until Celebrimbor brought it up himself had deflated, slightly. Elrond was… He was not seeking a reflection for his own bitterness, he was not seeking something to harmonize it with, he was not, he was _not_. (No, he was not. And those moments when he longed for something to match him in his mind and in his heart were moments that he pushed back down with ruthless speed. That was not for him, not in this Second Age of Anor. This Second Age of Anor had no room for his anger, for his bitterness. All of his anger and bitterness were relics of the bygone Age, things that should have drowned with Beleriand, and yet, here they were, following after him, trailing seawater and blood. They were not things that he should ever give a voice to, not ever, and the feeling of festering within him perhaps meant that one day they would die, yet silent.) He was not seeking a reflection for his own bitterness, nor something for it to harmonize with, but when he saw signs of it in another, he _knew_ it must be festering inside of them, thanks to that festering feeling inside of _him_ , and while Elrond could hope that the festering meant that his bitterness would die without ever being expressed, he knew also that festering had an equal chance of poisoning the bearer. He was a loremaster-in-training, but he had also felt enough interest in medicine and healing to go for lessons in that, as well. For that, you had to feel _some_ level of concern for those around you, for those who were your patients, and those who could potentially _become_ your patients.

A purging could be just the thing, sometimes, though Elrond had never held much truck with the bloodletting practiced by some healers among Men (and thankfully, no one in Lindon seemed particularly to go for that practice, themselves)—the healers among Men swore by its efficacy, and some of their patients did, sometimes, seem to have gotten better after having small amounts of blood drained from their bodies, but Elrond’s experiences with bleeding were limited to watching people bleed to death in front of him, and you would never convince him that bloodletting could have any _true_ medical value, not after experiences like that. If it soothed the patient, then perhaps the fact that their anxiety was somewhat less alleviated their symptoms, but Elrond did _not_ believe that the bloodletting itself had _anything_ to do with it.

But he had gotten off-topic. A purging could help a patient, sometimes, even if only because the exertion would give them some sense of accomplishment, some sense of closure (Though Elrond was not always certain that ‘closure’ was something that even existed, not really—at least, not for him). But it was also something that could rip the scar tissue off of old wounds and leave them to bleed, bleed, bleed, until there was nothing left inside of you but the bitterness that clung to your lifeless bones.

There was a risk to it. There could be a very _dire_ risk to it. It was risk enough that Elrond hesitated to take it, even if he could have found the words. And the risk was not just to Celebrimbor, was it?

Elrond ate his dissatisfying supper in silence, chewing slowly, swallowing down on mouthfuls that felt as if they had turned to cement in his throat, watching Celebrimbor, and finding nothing in him that he could say. The irritation took hold of him again, the question in his mind of why he should hover over Celebrimbor, trying to soothe, trying to cosset, when Celebrimbor would not speak of it himself. If Celebrimbor wished to seek out help, he had a mouth with which he could ask for it, eyes with which he could appeal for it, hands with which he could reach out for it. (And how good had Elrond ever been at asking for help, hmm? How good had he ever been at speaking of it, of appealing for it, of reaching out for it? He put that aside uncomfortably, unwilling to dwell on it any longer, but it still sat in the back of his mind, watching him frostily, waiting for an answer.) Elrond was not going to reach out into the darkness of uncertainty when he could well be reaching out into nothingness, or worse, into the domain of something that did not suffer intrusion gladly and thought nothing of biting the hands of impudent intruders.

Let Celebrimbor speak to him regarding this, and Elrond would respond. Until that moment came, or until Elrond’s curiosity and his concern could bear silence no longer, Elrond would not ask. He would not, he absolutely would _not_.

…Try as he might, he could not shut the impulse off completely. Elrond had never been able to shut the impulse off completely, something that had never given him much in the way of _joy_ —he was well aware of how vulnerable it made him, well-aware of how much more easily he could be hurt this way, perhaps hurt in a way that he would spend years grappling with, if he was ever able to push past it at all. (He was still grappling with all that had come to him to ignite his sympathy _before_. He kept waiting for relief, kept waiting for some sign of sunlight shining through the gloom, and nothing.)

It was foolish, and he knew it. Elrond could not make other people’s problems into his concerns, especially not if they would not confide them. He had more than his fair share of problems to be getting on with; shouldering the problems of others sounded like an excellent way to break his back. And yet…

Perhaps it was thanks to all of the time they had spent in each other’s company, without the company of anyone else that either of them knew, anyone else whom they could really have held a conversation with. Perhaps it was because Elrond had spent so long now in Celebrimbor’s company without anyone else around him, that this had cropped up. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it would always have come to him, in time, had they never left Lindon together to go on this expedition. Perhaps Elrond would always have eventually noticed some strange chink in the armor of Celebrimbor’s seemingly unbreakable cheer and good temper. Perhaps he would have always felt this way.

Or perhaps Elrond would not have, without the connection that had formed between them, tenuous and shifting as it was. He didn’t know why, but that thought bothered him. They were already _bound_ , of course; Elrond could hardly ignore the blood dripping off of the links that bound them together, not when it was staining his trousers, sinking into his boots, and squelching under his toes. But a link forged in something other than blood, that had not arisen until now. It hardly would have had the opportunity to, considering that Elrond had always balked at any conversation offered, balked at any offer to know Celebrimbor better.

He could not regret it truly, could not regret it wholly. To regret truly or wholly what he had done in the interest of protecting himself posed a greater risk of harm. But there was some part of Elrond that cursed at the idea of knowing that he could have known more, that he could have been in a position to do more, right here and right now, if he had ever accepted the hand offered to him. To reject that part of himself was risking harm as well, for regret was so much a part of Elrond that to excise it totally risked carrying the rest of himself off with it.

But there had been a _reason_ he had never taken that hand, hadn’t there been? As uninterested as Elrond was in ripping open someone else’s scar tissue and making them bleed, bleed, bleed, until they were dry husks on the floor and their blood spelled out their life’s story, he was equally uninterested in undergoing the same risk himself. His life was not for consumption, his life’s story was not meant to entertain, and he would _not_ be bled like a pig to amuse anyone, let alone unfeeling strangers. It did not matter that the offer of it was couched in a smile like sunlight, did not matter that Celebrimbor never seemed quite to grasp what it was he risked doing. Elrond could not accept what was offered to him, not when he knew the risk inherent in it.

He must _remember_ that, for memory had been failing him increasingly, these past several days. Elrond shook his head, biting back a heavy sigh. Memory had never failed him in such a way before, had never failed to remind him at any pass of all that might do him harm. That it had started now…

_I have a problem_ , Elrond thought gloomily, as his gaze drifted over to Celebrimbor once more. He had a problem, alright, and it came in the form of the man sitting right beside him, eating his supper in silence.

…And now, now it was occurring to him also that he never had learned just what it was that had happened to Celebrimbor when that ghost had assailed him the night before, just what it was that he had been seeing or hearing or feeling when the ghost had grabbed on to his arm.

So. There was something else that Elrond had to deal with, something else he might well have to track down. Actually, no: the matter of what the ghost had done to Celebrimbor when it touched him, why he still had the use of his arm but had otherwise seemed so much more badly affected by it than Elrond had been when he had slashed at that same ghost, that was not something that Elrond could put off until after they left the island, regardless of whether Celebrimbor saw fit to speak to him about it. Elrond _needed_ to know. Part of it was to try and guess if there was some answer there to just what had happened to his hand—still quite numb and useless, thank you very much—and how it might be healed, if time was not enough on its own to heal it. Part of it was of the concern that there was something very presently wrong with Celebrimbor, that the ghost had harmed him somehow, even if his body had thus far shown no sign of injury. Part of it was just Elrond’s own insatiable, bottomless curiosity, demanding that he derive answers every time he turned his attention to what had happened the night before.

_More than one thing happened the night before_. And now, Elrond was averting his gaze from Celebrimbor, unable to bring himself to look at him, fearful that his thoughts would have been plain on his face, even if he said nothing, even if Celebrimbor said nothing in response.

There was something _else_ to deal with, and as regards to that, Elrond had not one clue. It was not something he wished to progress in without surety, not something he wanted to reach out his hand for, without the assurance that there would be a hand reaching out for him in return.

Hmm, hands. It was strange how different a hand reaching out could look, depending on the circumstances, depending on the lightning, depending on the quality of the smile, depending on Elrond’s own feelings. He wanted greater stability than this, he did. Elrond had had enough experience of the ground trembling beneath his feet to fear the devastation that could and often did follow behind it. He wanted stability. He wanted consistency. He wanted things to make _sense_.

The world that had so often laughed in the face of everything that Elrond wanted was laughing at him again. Elrond could have no consistency, and no matter how he attempted to shape his experiences, he could not quite shape them into something that made any real sense to him.

Or, perhaps, he could. Perhaps Elrond could make sense of it, if he tried hard enough, if he took his thoughts down a very particular path.

Yes, he could make sense of it, if he journeyed down that particular path.

Elrond did not particularly want to journey down that path. Not yet, not here. It didn’t feel like quite the moment, didn’t feel quite like something he could make natural within himself. Not yet. Not yet, not yet. He could not spur himself forward, not yet, could not risk making himself look ridiculous just yet, and if he was right, if his suppositions were correct…

That felt like a step too far. Actually, that didn’t feel like a step too far as much as it just felt like a step over the side of a cliff, despite knowing just where his feet were leading him. The idea of it made him feel jittery and strange, skin over-sensitive and mind flitting nervously from train of thought to train of thought, never able to settle on any one thing for too long. It was infused with a sort of sick anticipation, something he wanted to run away from, something he wanted to reach out and grab and hold to himself until either he suffocated it, or it suffocated him.

Not yet, not yet. Elrond folded up the paper his travel rations had been contained in, slipping them back in his pack. Not yet, not yet. He had known something like that before, though the flavor was different. He was still stitching up the wounds it had left behind.

-0-0-0-

Elrond had intended to look over the book once more once they were back down in the kitchens, where it was dry enough that he would not risk getting any water whatsoever on the delicate pages and even more delicate ink (It might not have been raining anymore, but there was still water dripping off of the sides of the awnings and clinging to the ground). Regardless of the fact that Elrond was having such a difficult time interpreting the book, regardless of the fact that he doubted he would _ever_ be able to interpret it properly, he had no intention of damaging this book. Someone else had already treated it so cruelly; Elrond had no intention of adding to that cruelty.

He had intended to examine the book once he returned to the kitchens, reading by the light of the lamp as it was hung up on a hook bolted into the ceiling, but life had a way of laughing in the face of his expectations, and this evening was no exception.

They… You know, they had spent longer sitting out under the veranda in the courtyard longer than Elrond had intended for them to do. Celebrimbor had been staring up at the sky, and he had seemed… He had seemed peaceful, in a way that he had not seemed for a moment since they had first arrived at the island, and peace had deserted him alongside his typical gregariousness. Or perhaps he was not more peaceful, and Elrond’s mind and his eyes were playing tricks, but either way, Elrond had stared at Celebrimbor (once he had found the nerve to look at him again once more), and had felt absolutely no desire to disturb him.

Elrond did not remember the way to the kitchen, not down in the dark where there could well have been many branching pathways, and even if he did, he did not want to leave Celebrimbor without the lamp once he finally roused himself to stand and go seeking his bed. So Elrond said nothing, and did not go anywhere else—it wasn’t as if he knew his way around the castle well enough to go wandering as he waited for Celebrimbor to be ready to go back down to the kitchens and rest himself. Even if Elrond could have brought himself to disturb Celebrimbor for any length of time, he wouldn’t have been able to go far.

So they sat there, in a silence that was almost companionable, though in that moment Elrond found himself questioning just what flavor of ‘companionable’ he was angling after, and thus, the companionable aspect of the silence shriveled out of existence, at least for him. No silence could be companionable when he was so uncomfortable and apprehensive.

They sat in a silence that was not companionable, though only one of them was fully aware of just how uncomfortable it was, and how much more uncomfortable it _could_ have been. Elrond watched as dark clouds rolled in to hide a little more of that citrine sky, as that citrine sky darkened to a deep, smoky topaz, as the blackness at the edges of the sky grew stronger, as it crept across the horizons towards the center, as the stars began to twinkle behind the veil of the twilight sky, as day finally, undeniably, became night.

It was not… was not the worst evening Elrond had ever spent. Yes, he knew that did not count for much, considering the succession of genuinely, horrifically _awful_ evenings he had spent lining up for review, the line crawling so far back that Elrond could only watch as it slipped back all the way past the horizon. Needless to say, someone with Elrond’s life, or someone who had had a life that was only halfway to being like this, they would have a wide selection of awful evenings to look back on and ponder. So no, it did not mean much, that this was not an unpleasant evening, that bar having been set so low that it was only visibly off of the ground if you lied down on your side and held up a magnifying glass to the bar. While squinting. But it did mean something.

It was not the worst evening Elrond had ever spent. By some measures, it was actually somewhat pleasant, for while Elrond had little to do, and the anxiety regarding his hand lurked every moment just past the surface of his mind, it was peaceful, and he did not spend any moment of it worrying for his own safety, or the safety of his companion (And again, how exactly was that word to be meant?).

It was not the worst evening Elrond had ever spent, but like all other evenings, it eventually had to end, and eventually, for whatever reason—perhaps Celebrimbor’s legs were just sore after sitting cross-legged on the hard stone pathway, and he wanted to stretch his legs—Celebrimbor had finally stirred himself, sighing and rolling his shoulders before getting to his feet.

Celebrimbor looked down at Elrond, gaze level and face markedly… No, it was not calm. Calmness implied a level of emotion greater than that which Elrond was able to make out, as the shadows crept over Celebrimbor’s skin. Celebrimbor’s face was not calm; rather, it was supine. It was what Elrond had seen in him, before that bright, taut thing, before the bitterness. (And yet, he knew that both could resurface at a moment’s notice, if Celebrimbor thought the situation warranted it.)

“Are you ready?” Celebrimbor asked simply.

To that, Elrond could only nod. He did not quite trust himself to speak.

Back down in the kitchens, Elrond waited until Celebrimbor had lied down on his pallet and rolled over so that his back was turned to Elrond, before Elrond took the book from his pack. It was silly, behaving like a child who had made off with something that did not belong to him, when he was an adult and it wasn’t as if there was anyone here who would have been in a position to rail at him for taking a book out of the library without following the proper procedures. It was silly, when this was hardly an activity likely to keep Celebrimbor awake, not unless Elrond decided to try his hand at reading _aloud_ (Or unless he found a section of defacement so enraging as to provoke _noise_ , though Elrond hoped that he would be able to restrain his temper more effectively than that). It was silly, when there was absolutely no reason for why Elrond should feel so apprehensive, and yet, he could not bring himself to pull the book out of his bag until he was certain that Celebrimbor had gone to sleep.

Not that Elrond spent very long looking at it. It was not a very large volume, and Elrond had already flipped through it fully during his time at the library. Now, he simply found himself revisiting passages where there was little in the way of inky defacement, revisiting the rare passage where there was no defacement at all, squinting, holding the book close to his face, trying to determine if a second inspection would be any more enlightening than the first had been.

There was nothing here that was any easier for Elrond to decipher on the second inspection than it had been on the first. He had _not_ spontaneously developed greater knowledge of alchemy in the three or four hours it had been since he had slipped the book into his bag, and neither had he developed the sort of eagle-like eyesight that would have allowed him to make heads or tails of the most faded sections of writing. And the diagrams?

Hmm, the diagrams, if possible, made even less sense to him now than they had before. Elrond had had limited experience of alchemy diagrams, and he had noticed that they tended to differ between the Sindarin and Exilic branches (Both kindreds of the Eldar had developed alchemy independently of each other, at different times, and though there were a surprising amount of commonalities between the two branches, they were not entirely similar). This one was undoubtedly of the Exilic branch, if not the pure Amanyarin Ñoldor branch, considering just how conservative that dialect of Quenya was, but there were some… abnormalities. A symbol in the wrong place, or a symbol in the right place, but taken down upside down. Again, Elrond’s experience of alchemy diagrams was decidedly limited, and most of the times he could not have told you what he was even looking at, but something about these diagrams, the diagram attached to the one complete formula in particular, just did not seem right.

After a while, Elrond began to feel the tenderness in his head that presaged a headache, and would surely _become_ a headache if he persisted in the activity that had put that tenderness in his head to start with. Elrond had neglected to bring any of his typical headache cures with him—headaches more typically found him in winter and spring—and when he did _not_ have a headache cure on hand to combat the pains with, his headaches could stay with him for hours. Days, sometimes.

He did not need that right now. On top of everything else that Elrond was dealing with, a headache that would stay with him for days like a sunburn or a bruise was the last thing he needed. Sighing, sparing an apprehensive glance at the earth and wondering just what it had in store for him tonight, Elrond returned the book to his bag, and lied down. What he hoped, the last thing he hoped for before he fell asleep, was that whatever dreams found him tonight, they would not be such that he would wake up wishing he had chosen the headache instead.

-0-0-0-

He was in the reeds again, though the Sea sought to take nothing from him this night, or perhaps there was no need, and it had taken everything there was to take, and Elrond just could not feel the difference, because there had never been much to take in the first place. There was always that possibility, as unattractive as it might be.

Elrond stood in the reeds again, but they had grown, grown so tall that they towered overhead, blocking any sight of the Sea, though Elrond could hear its roar and smell its salt and its blood, blocking out any sight of the sky, though Elrond was so drowning in darkness that he knew that it must have been night. A night where Ithil shone bright overhead, perhaps, since some strands of milky light wormed their way through the reeds, since he could see anything at all, but still, a deep, dark night. He was in the reeds, and he was alone.

Yes, he was alone. He was peculiarly aware of that, considering that he was often alone in these dreams, either truly, or because his only companions had no possible analog in the waking world, for how utterly bizarre they were. It was not unusual for Elrond to be alone in his dreams, but tonight, he was particularly aware of that, the awareness bearing down on him like a yoke made entirely out of lead, like he was the only person left in the world at all.

When Elrond thought about being the last person left in the world, he really did not know whether he regarded such an idea with alarm. There were the practical difficulties of being the last sapient being alive in the world to consider, true, and there were the psychological effects to consider, equally true, but those were for _later_ , those were for when hunger found him and loneliness found him and Elrond was confronted with the question of how to build a house entirely unaided, if no empty houses could be found. For right now, for right now when he was in the reeds and he was surrounded by Sea and salt and blood, when he was not entirely certain that there was anything inside of him at all and he had absolutely no idea how anyone else would respond to seeing the empty husk that was left behind, the empty husk that was all that was left of him now, solitude did not seem like such an awful fate.

Finding that his legs were not rooted to the ground as they had been the night before—or had they been, really? Elrond’s memory of the dreams could grow hazy, when he was in a dream himself—Elrond turned about, away from the roaring of the Sea (though that roaring was nearly all-encompassing), trying to make for more solid ground.

It should take… Elrond couldn’t remember how much time it would take, on foot, to get out of the reed sea, to escape the Lisgardh and come to truly solid ground on the shores of the delta of the River Sirion. The refugee camp, at least, the one he had been born in, was located on a small ‘island’, if you wanted to call something that regularly flooded after even a storm of moderate strength an ‘island.’ It was allegedly solid ground, but surrounding it was marsh and tide pools and sink holes and rivulets of water that never emptied out no matter how low the tide was. The refugee camp had skewed his perceptions somewhat, and skewing his perceptions rather more was the fact that he had been five years old the last time he had laid eyes on any part of the Lisgardh in his waking world.

Elrond was not certain how long it should take him to reach truly solid ground. Considering that the Lisgardh had successfully hidden its refugees from the servants of Angband until they were finally brought to total ruin by other Edhil, the Lisgardh had to be absolutely massive, a massive tangle of reeds and whatever plants grew in such a marsh, and could thrive alongside massive, man-high reeds that would have blocked out much of the sunlight at the ground, enough of a tangle to confound any Orc or goblin and daunt anything trying to scout out from above. (Elrond could not remember if there had been archers standing sentry. There _must_ have been, but he could not for the life of him remember.)

So… Days? Hours could not be sufficient, surely, for if it only took hours to go from the edge of the Sea to the edge of the Lisgardh and come to truly solid ground, then surely the servants of Angband would have found the refugee camp long before the Sons of Fëanor; even the hatred and fear of the Sea that struck Morgoth’s servants must pale in comparison to their fear of their master’s wrath if they disobeyed his orders. It must be days, it must take days to traverse the Lisgardh on foot.

It would take days, but Elrond remembered how to look for mussels and other edibles out here in the reeds. He remembered which ones were safe to eat raw, and which ones must be avoided unless they had been properly cooked. If he even felt hunger in the confines of the dream, anyways.

He walked and walked and walked, and the roaring of the Sea never seemed to grow any more distant behind him, never seemed to grow any less all-encompassing. The ground beneath his feet never seemed to grow any drier, never squelched any less, never shimmered with the darkling reflection of tide pools and rivulets any less. Elrond paused a moment, troubled, staring all around him, but he could not see anything through the reeds, could not make out any sign of Sea or solid ground, could not see Ithil shining down upon him, could not catch any glimpse of moonlit foam, could not see even any crabs skittering between tidal pool and tidal pool.

He was alone. He was so very alone. It was not Edhil and Men and Hadhodrim and Onodrim and all of the foul things that Morgoth had twisted into his minions, not just them. It was every living thing, perhaps—at least, every living thing that drew breath. There were these reeds, and nothing else. There were these reeds, and there was Elrond.

He had been surrounded by the reeds as a child. He had been born into this reed sea alongside his brother, like a crab or a fish—or perhaps a seagull or a plover would be more appropriate, considering what had become of their mother, in the end. He had been surrounded by these reeds, and they had sheltered him and his people for a time—for such a short time, such a short time, until they hadn’t, until smoke and fire and blood had come for them, until the Sea itself had come for them, and Elrond had never known, never known at all, whether anyone was still living in the camp in the Lisgardh when the Sea swallowed the Lisgardh whole, never known if he could expect to see the face of anyone he had half-known (he could never have truly _known_ them when the acquaintance ended when he was five years old) staring back at him as a ghost from the surface of the water. The Lisgardh and the Sea had sheltered them, until they hadn’t, until the Lisgardh that had confounded their would-be killers for so long had parted for those who should have fought alongside them, until the Sea that had warded off the servants of Angband for so long had reached out its hand to kill them itself.

Elrond was surrounded by the reeds. Were he a child, he might have taken comfort in that. But he was a man. He had seen how flimsy a protection the Lisgardh was in the end, and he had seen just how much of a protector the Sea was, in the end. He needed to find solid ground.

Solid ground was not interested in finding him.

Elrond kept walking, kept walking in the direction that seemed furthest from the Sea, kept walking in the direction where the roar of the Sea—no song tonight, no song in the dense and hazy world of the dream, just the roaring and crashing of endless and insatiable hunger—seemed at least a modicum fainter than in all other directions. He kept walking. He had no idea how long it was that he walked. He kept walking, and the ground never firmed. He never stopped seeing water on the ground beneath him. The reeds never thinned. He never saw any sign of Ithil.

The reeds never thinned, but the water started to come up, the water started to creep up, higher and higher and higher than it had ever been when Elrond lived in the Lisgardh in the waking world, higher even than it had been when the refugee camp would flood and their mother would give Elrond and Elros buckets to help her bail water out of their house with. (It had never occurred to him at the time, the absurdity of a _queen_ having to bail water out of her own house, but it was occurring to him now, and the vague memories of a small, dark-haired woman, her back turned as she furiously tried to dump water out of one of the windows, brought a bubble of hysterical laughter to Elrond’s lips. When he let it loose from his mouth, it sounded like water dripping from a rock onto sand.) It was coming up over his ankles, and then nearly to his knees, but when Elrond tried to stop himself walking, he found that his legs kept on moving of their own accord, that nothing he did was capable of stopping himself, and the water just kept coming and coming and coming up over his legs.

It was a slow ascent, that water. Part of the trouble was that, at the start, the water had been rising so very slowly that Elrond did not notice it. There had always been water squelching up when he pressed his foot into the sand; there had always been water beading around the edges of his booted feet. You expected this from the Lisgardh, you expected this from marshland. There was always to be water in marshland, even at the lowest of low tides; if you found a marshland and you found it bone dry, there was something horribly, horribly wrong with it.

There was always water in a marshland, and thus, Elrond was hardly going to mark the fact that there _was_ water lapping at his feet, that there were droplets of water trying to find their way in through chinks in his boots to wet his feet, that the water was slowly creeping over the tops of his boots. That was just what water _did_ , especially when there was a tide attached. Why was he supposed to mark it?

Elrond did not mark it at first, and he did not know if he even _could_ have marked it, for his mind might simply have filtered the information out. But as he kept walking, on and on and on, with no input from his own will, his legs working entirely on their own and giving Elrond absolutely _no_ indication of when they intended to stop, Elrond, unable to see anything past the reeds, was left to stare down at his feet to at least try to make sure he didn’t put his foot in a hole and twist his ankle (could he twist his ankle in a dream? It seemed like such a silly thing to worry about, and yet…), and then, yes, he saw the water.

So slowly. It started so slowly. But it didn’t _stop_ , the water just kept coming, just kept rising, rose over his boots and his ankles, rose up to his knees, crept up until it was encircling his waist, and then it just kept on coming.

The reeds should be parting, if the water was this high. If the water was this high, then the reeds should have given way to the open Sea, because even when the refugee camp had flooded, the water had not come up so high that it would have come up to Elrond’s waist as a grown man, never that high, not even once. The highest tides wouldn’t come up even to his knees if he was still in the Lisgardh, and not on the beach itself. But the reeds were still as dense as they had ever been, opening up just barely enough for him to struggle his way through, the reeds scraping against his sides, scratching his face, clutching at his hands. The water was rising up higher and higher, the reeds were not receding to give precedence to the Sea, and Elrond could do nothing but walk forward down into it, finding that the water that should normally have slowed his pace to a crawl was slowing him down not at all.

What was to happen once the water came up over his mouth and his nose? Would that finally be the moment when his legs stopped moving, when he came to a halt and was finally allowed to retreat, or would he just keep on walking, just keep on walking down into the Sea, where there was no light and no air and no solace for him?

He could not drown in a dream. At least, Elrond did not _think_ that he could drown in a dream. If he could _die_ in a dream by any means and have that death carry over to the waking world, he would have long since been dragged to the Houses of the Dead, no doubt to be stared down by a Doomsman contemplating how long it had been since he had last had to judge the soul of a dead Edhel who had died through such _ridiculous_ means as this.

Elrond could not drown in a dream, and he held that thought in his mind for as long as he could, for as well as he could when the water was inching up his neck, a harsh touch completely unlike any touch he had ever felt on his neck, unlike any touch he had ever imagined feeling on his neck, unlike any touch that he _wanted_ to feel on his neck.

He could not drown in a dream. The water was tickling his chin.

He could not drown in a dream. He water was trying to push into his mouth.

He could not drown in a dream.

And now, the water was spilling over his head, and Elrond could hear nothing but the water. The Sea was no doubt roaring overhead still, but Elrond could not hear it. The Sea was made of water, but water was something entirely separate from the Sea. The water was in his ears, and the sound of it drowned out the Sea entirely.

He just kept on walking, his legs heedless of the water all around him. Elrond was not drowning, and he was not breathing either, but then, this was a dream. This was a dream, and Elrond could do nothing about the source of it. That thought was more immediately alarming than even the realization that the water was coming up over his body, though the alarm of it was tempered by the weariness of long knowledge and grudging acceptance. This was a dream, and Elrond could control none of it, could change the course of absolutely nothing. He was sleeping with his body pressed up against the hard earth. That there was bedding and clothing between flesh and dirt made no difference. The earth-dreams had come for him, and there was nothing he could do but see its course through, and hope that it would not take him anywhere that his mind could not bear to go.

He was walking below the surface of the Sea, though the reeds never parted, though the reeds never thinned, though the reeds that should have been drowning, even if Elrond could not, were not withering and dying and floating away to rot on the surface of the water. Elrond’s hair fanned out around him, tangling in the reeds—the little sparks of pain were nothing against the pressure on his body, though Elrond felt oddly divorced from both, as if the pain was in fact happening to someone else, and he was a mere spectator, trying to imagine what pain the other was feeling—the reeds brushed against him like clutching hands, and the path just went ever on and on, with no sign of it ever stopping.

Well, as far as Elrond’s earth-dreams went, this one was oddly tame. He’d _smelled_ blood, but he’d not seen any tonight, and that left him in a decidedly less distressing place than most of his earth-dreams cared to leave him—well, if he could call being pressed down upon by tons and tons of water something _other_ than distressing. It was… Do you know, he was almost bored? There was nothing to see here but water and reeds; he was so utterly alone that there weren’t even any fish swimming through the reed sea.

A light glimmered, off in the darkness.

Elrond…

It was not moonlight. It looked like moonlight, but Elrond could not stress enough how much it was _not_ moonlight. It did not flicker the way moonlight diluted by water would flicker; it was steady, and radiant, and shone like pale fire, though there was no fire that could sustain itself beneath so much water.

It did not get closer. No matter how far Elrond walked, and it felt as if he had been walking for years, the light never got any closer. It was merely a glimmer, a sparkle, off in the distance, so far away that it was barely any closer than that far horizon.

It was not moonlight. Elrond felt as if he had seen it before, but the closest resemblance it had was to moonlight, and it was not—

He…

Yes, he knew what it was.

Elrond felt a bitterness of the sort that no dream, not even the strangest of his earth-dreams, could have ever hoped to dilute. Well, the dream was no longer quite as boring as it had once been. But there was no comfort to be found in this sudden addition. No comfort at all.

_I do not wish to bear the burden of others’ obsessions._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Amanyar** —‘Those of Aman’ (Quenya) (singular: Amanya—probably) (adjectival form: Amanyarin); those Elves who made the journey to Aman, or were born there.  
>  **Anor** —the Sindarin name for the Sun  
>  **Edhel** —Elf (plural: Edhil) (Sindarin)  
>  **Edhil** —Elves (singular: Edhel) (Sindarin)  
>  **Eldar** —‘People of the Stars’ (Quenya); a name first given to the Elves by Oromë when he found them by Cuiviénen, but later came to refer only to those who answered the summons to Aman and set out on the March, with those who chose to remain by Cuiviénen coming to be known as the Avari; the Eldar were composed of these groups: the Vanyar, Ñoldor (those among them who chose to go to Aman), and the Teleri (including their divisions: the Lindar, Falmari, Sindar and Nandor).  
>  **Hadhodrim** —a Sindarin name for the Dwarves, ultimately adapted from the Khuzdul Khazâd (singular: Hadhod) (Sindarin)  
>  **Ithil** —the Sindarin name for the Moon; of the Sun and the Moon, it is the elder of the two vessels, lit by Telperion’s last flower; in an early version of ‘Of the Sun and Moon and the Hiding of Valinor’ was said to be “the giver of visions” (The Lost Road 264). As this form is very similar to ‘Isil’, the Quenya form (which is likely to be its original form, as the vessel of the Moon was made in Aman), it is likely that ‘Ithil’ was adapted from ‘Isil’; all I can suppose is that the Valar got in contact with Melian at some point during the First Age to share information.  
>  **Lisgardh** —A marshy region by the Mouths of Sirion, a land of reeds that grow man-high and dense as a forest. Its name in earlier drafts was ‘Arlisgion,’ translated in The Book of Lost Tales 2 as “the place of reeds” (155).  
>  **Onodrim** —the Sindarin name given to the Ents (Sindarin) (singular: Onod)


	19. Chapter Nineteen

Elrond awoke, and his first thought was that someone had stuck his hand full of needles.

There was one moment, one glorious moment when he woke in a gloom lit up by blue light far over his head, and he could not feel anything, not even the attendant soreness of having slept on unyielding earth with only a few layers of cloth between that earth and his own body. If Elrond could have clung to that moment and carried it forward with him into the morning, he thought he would have been much happier.

Alas, such a state could not be his. There was that one moment, when Elrond was still floating in the embrace of a sleep that, while its dreams had not been pleasant for him, had at least been devoid of anything resembling pain. There was that one moment, and then, there was everything that followed after it.

Elrond did _not_ sit bolt upright when he felt that sharp, prickling, many-pointed pain. To sit upright would have required a bit more wherewithal than he would have been capable of at this very moment. To sit upright would have required the pain to be rather less than it was.

To sit upright would have required for him not to be doubled-over in agony, and since lying on his side was a position uniquely well-suited to being doubled-over in agony, why go to the trouble of getting up when he would just have to curl back into the position he was already in?

That would be the thought that would occur to him if the pain was a little less. If the pain was a little less, perhaps Elrond would have been able to focus on anything at all that was not the pain itself. As it was, the pain was… _absorbing._

He could not scream, could not wail, could not even cry out. Elrond woke, had one moment of total numbness, and then was left to curl up on his side, knees pulled towards his chest, as if folding his body in on itself would be enough to stem the agony, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t, it _wasn’t_. The pain was in his hand, pain like a thousand invisible needles had been stabbed into his flesh by some especially vindictive seamstress (and given the particular nature of the thoughts he had been devoting lately to those who worked with thread and cloth, there was no shortage of seamstresses and weavers who would have wanted the chance to cause him a little pain—all of them getting together for this purpose would definitely have accounted for the pain), but it was not staying in his hand, not neatly, not _nicely_. The pain put out feelers up his arm, radiating soreness and twinging pain all the way up to his shoulder, and then left out into his chest and his back, before it found its way into his veins, and it felt like his whole body was stung not with needles, but by wasps. A little venom in the one sting could leave you sore for a few days, but would not overwhelm. If you were stung a hundred, a _thousand_ times, then even those who did not evince unusually strong reactions to the one sting could and _would_ be brought to their knees.

One small cut would not kill. Elrond had learned that early on. One small cut would not kill, not even if it was a cut on the neck or close to the femoral artery. But a hundred, a _thousand_ small cuts, oh, yes, that could kill.

Elrond had never thought that there would be anything that would make him prefer the numbness that had taken over his hand after that ill-fated encounter in the town as the storm raged and Anor sank below the western horizon. He had never thought that there would be a time when he _wished_ for that numbness, when he wished for the helplessness that attended the loss of the use of his dominant hand, unable to wield a sword or a dagger, unable to wield a dinner knife or a fork, unable to wield a _pen_. In his right mind, he would never have wished for that helplessness, would never have wished for that control to be taken so thoroughly out of his hands.

Pain had a way of driving men out of their right minds, and then locking the door behind them so that they couldn’t get back in.

Elrond had never thought that anything would come to him that would make him wish for the numbness that had stolen over his hand, but he was wishing for it _now_. He gritted his teeth, the sounds that spilled out from between the gaps never managing to reach the volume needed to be termed as ‘whimpers,’ for he could find not the strength to put his voice behind them. He ought to sit up, ought to hold his hand up to the light to see what injury might or might not even now be spreading over his skin. Ought to, ought to, ought to. Elrond had a practical mind (when he could afford practicality), and he knew that for pain like this, he ought to sit up and examine the hand, at least, to ensure that whatever was going on wouldn’t necessitate an amputation— _and wouldn’t that be something, wouldn’t that be something_ here _, of all places, what would he have said if he could see this now, would he have laughed or scolded or would he have just stared until the moment come, would he have fled the room would he have held me down would he have snapped at all the doctors and told them exactly what they would have to do what what what_

He ought to sit up. Ought to. What Elrond ought to do and what he was presently capable of doing were two very different things.

Elrond folded in on himself a little more, cringing, swallowing down a wave of gorge that had suddenly surged up his throat like the Sea pushing water through a rock channel at high tide. He held his hand away from him, wishing for cooler air—nothing, absolutely not even the most frigid winter air would have been enough to ease the pain enough to for him to relax, for him to find his voice for even a moment, but it might have made him a little more comfortable, might have prevented the beads of sweat now rolling down his face and pooling in shirt collar. And the new distance of his hand from his body did not do him any favors, either, no, his body was not merciful enough for that. The pain was now more concentrated on his hand itself, it was true, but the price for that concentration was that the pain in his hand now somehow felt even more intense than it had been when Elrond had first awoken. How, how…

Elrond had not intended to wake Celebrimbor. Of course, he’d not intended to wake Celebrimbor any of the _other_ times he had managed to wake Celebrimbor, and that had never been enough to keep him from _actually_ waking Celebrimbor up. If it made any difference at all, Elrond had not been thinking about Celebrimbor this time, though he might have been awake for the past several minutes. Pain was absorbing; pain made you self-absorbed. Elrond could focus on nothing that was not related to the pain. Celebrimbor had been pushed past the edges of his mind into the abyss where everything else was currently consigned. He had not intended to wake Celebrimbor.

Elrond had not intended to wake Celebrimbor, and when Celebrimbor did wake, Elrond was not cognizant of it at the first. He could focus on nothing but the pain, and thus, the rustling of cloth, a questioning murmur escaping Celebrimbor’s lips (if indeed he did call out; Elrond would never know for sure), and the soft, dusty clump of feet walking across the floor, these things never reached his ears. He was cognizant of nothing until there was a hand gently jostling his shoulder, and even then, had Elrond not been forced to contend with the sudden pressure of being slightly rolled onto his right arm, Elrond was not certain he would have noticed even that.

As it was, suddenly being rolled onto his right arm, even if only slightly, pushed the gorge in his throat just a little closer to his mouth, and the sick agony of forcing it all down, of pressing his stomach even tighter, that forced Elrond right into staring up into Celebrimbor’s face, blinking dazedly.

He could not at first make out the exact expression on Celebrimbor’s face. The world was swimming all around him, and everything within Elrond’s field of vision—though that was mostly Celebrimbor’s face, there was a bit of lamplight in there as well—was shifting and rippling as if he was viewing it from underwater. Even so, Elrond thought that Celebrimbor’s expression might have changed at least once before Elrond’s eyes finally came back into focus and he could make out his companion’s face clearly. It did not matter. Whatever those two expressions had been, he knew not, and he doubted that Celebrimbor would have told him if he asked. It did not matter. In the face of the pain of a thousand needles in Elrond’s hand, such things did not matter.

When Elrond’s eyes finally came into focus and he could look clearly up at Celebrimbor’s face, Celebrimbor was staring back down at him, brow deeply furrowed, mouth deeply curved in a deep frown. Later, Elrond would wonder if there was anything particular about that expression, if there was anything particular about the tilt of his head and the tight line of his jaw, but for now, the pain pushed such frivolous things from his mind and demanded _me me me only think about me_.

Elrond had known demanding pain in his time. Most of his pain had been demanding pain, pain that absorbed him into it so quickly and so completely that he did not realize he was being devoured until after he found himself in the lightless blackness of the caverns of his pain. Most of that pain had not been centered on his body. Most of that pain had come from outside. It had been no less demanding for having come from outside. He never really enjoyed it. There was a certain strange, sickly comfort in nursing his own wounds, in fixating upon them and blinding himself to all else. He had never enjoyed it.

If Celebrimbor had an answer to this…

But how could he?

As it was, Celebrimbor had questions, rather than answers. “What is it?” he asked softly. “Another nightmare?”

If Elrond could have found it within him to laugh, he was not certain when he would ever have been able to stop. A nightmare? Oh, his earth-dreams were never pleasant, but if he could have traded this pain for an especially intense nightmare, if he could have traded the pain away for something that would at least have left him behind when he shifted from one state into another, he would have seized it in a heartbeat. Oh, for a nightmare to be the sum of his worries tonight, if night it still was. A nightmare would have been sweet relief from this pain, if he could even shake the pain when he drifted from wakefulness into sleep, if the pain, now that it had set in so, would even let him sleep.

Celebrimbor could not imagine how much Elrond wished it had been another nightmare.

Elrond tried to find the words to speak. He had the words quickly enough, but the next step was not so simple, not when the agony still sluggishly rippling up his arm, though now it could not find its way much higher up than his elbow, was so overwhelming that he could not even scream. He had the words to say to communicate the true source of his distress. Finding it within himself to push his voice into action, to stitch his voice to the words and shove the results out of his mouth, that was not so simple at all.

Celebrimbor leaned over him, patient or perhaps just not so concerned as Elrond had thought he might be, to find Elrond lying awake in such a state. The sting of _that_ thought still managed to reach him, in spite of everything that should have kept it out, and Elrond would have rolled his eyes at himself had the pain been just a little less. As it was, he was more inclined to self-pity, more inclined to frustration, and more inclined to stubbornly tacking his voice onto those words, even if the results made an Orc sound like Maglor singing his sweetest songs in his most honeyed voice.

“I… I…” His voice was as cracked as if he had been screaming, after all; so much for the pain driving the noise to ground, driving the vital noise that could have gotten him help earlier into the silence of the grave. He’d been so silent, and now he was paying the price of screaming, anyways. It wasn’t fair, but its unfairness was of a sort that Elrond was well familiar with. He knew its paths. He could bear it. “…My hand, it…”

And then, he could say no more. His voice had failed him once again, and Elrond could only hope that that was enough for Celebrimbor to get the gist. He was an intelligent man, after all; surely he could divine the meaning from Elrond’s words, from the state that Celebrimbor had found him in.

Celebrimbor’s already deep frown deepened a little more, carving furrows into his face like the wind carved ridges deep into the mountains, over the course of centuries and millennia. He reached past Elrond’s shoulder, and Elrond could only watch in sick anticipation as he stretched out his hand towards Elrond’s own right hand, lying prone far away the rest of his body—Elrond could not have drawn his hand back to himself quickly enough, even if his reflexes were what they were when he was not curled up on his side in abject pain.

He did not want the touch. The touch was sure to stoke the fire of his pain into an inferno. He wanted the touch. If Celebrimbor knew for certain what was wrong with Elrond’s hand, if he was able to divine the full story on his own, then perhaps…

Those thoughts were useless. It was all over before Elrond could even finish stitching them together. Celebrimbor’s fingertips brushed against the back of Elrond’s hand, and that…

He could feel it. He could feel another’s touch on his right hand once more.

He could feel it. It was _agonizing_.

No screams, still no screams. The pain had eaten all of his screams, told him to labor in his agony in silence, told him that he could not have the relief because that would have been a relief unequal to what was happening to his hand right now, and we would not want _that_ , now would we? No screams, because Elrond did not have it in himself to scream. He absolutely did have it in himself to jerk his entire _body_ away from Celebrimbor’s outstretched hand, had it in him to reel his hand back into himself, had it in him to clench his teeth and squeeze his eyes shut as the world all around him began to swim again, began to warp and wobble and shift.

Celebrimbor did not try for his hand again. That was the one mercy in all of this, paltry a mercy as it might have been. His hand went to Elrond’s left shoulder, stroking up and down from the shoulder to the elbow—the attempt to soothe was abortive and prickling and made something that wasn’t a scream because all of his screams had been eaten boil in Elrond’s throat. It wasn’t painful, wasn’t painful, it was something entirely separate from the pain, and yet, and yet, and yet and yet and yet there was something about it as unbearable as the needles of pain piercing his hand, something about it that made Elrond feel as if he was going to fall to pieces so small that he could never put himself back together again.

“It’s… It’s not numb anymore, I take it?”

To that, to _that_ , Elrond could find it in himself to laugh. It wasn’t an endless peal as he had thought it would be, but the harsh, crow-like caw that jarred from his mouth certainly _sounded_ familiar, didn’t it? Only, it had not come from his mouth when he had last heard it. Perhaps that was fitting. If Celebrimbor had gone seeking a match or a reflection for his own bitterness, then let him have the laugh, at least. Let him have the laugh.

He could find it in himself to laugh, and not to speak. The laughter spoke for him as well as words would have, thankfully, for Celebrimbor’s next motion was to slide his hands beneath Elrond’s prostrate body and force him slowly, painfully, up into a sitting position. “Hold out your hand,” he said firmly, so firmly that there could be no question about what it would turn into if Elrond failed to oblige him.

Gingerly, wincing at every last movement, Elrond held out his hand for Celebrimbor’s inspection. Celebrimbor still did not touch it, but sitting up like this, under the light of the lamp, they could both make the hand out much more clearly, and at least, at _least_ , there was no visible wound or discoloration on the skin. Whatever was wrong with Elrond clearly went far deeper than what flesh was visible to the eye, but at least it was not infection. He could not quite find relief within him, but he told himself over and over: _at least it’s not infection at least it’s not infection at least it’s not…_

“Does it hurt more when you stretch your fingers, or when you hold it in a resting position?” Celebrimbor asked him matter-of-factly, honestly more addressing Elrond’s _hand_ than Elrond himself, for all that his gaze was directed firmly on that hand, had not drifted upwards since Elrond had first held his hand out for a visual inspection.

What a ridiculous question to ask, even considering the fact that Elrond had not exactly been psychically projecting his pain about the room (He wouldn’t know where to begin doing something like that, honestly). The pain was… The pain was _the pain_ , it was itself, ineffable, unable to be quantified or labeled, and _certainly_ unable to be tested by such a measure. Gritting his teeth, Elrond stretched his fingers out, just to prove the point. Sure enough, there was no change in the pain, one way or another. It was as ineffable as it had ever been.

He could find no way to press the words out of his mouth, not now. The pain had stolen his screams, and it was trying to steal his voice entirely as well. He’d conserve what words he had, though conservation seemed a fool’s errand when he couldn’t even string those words together into anything that would have been intelligible. Instead, Elrond shook his head, struggling to hold his mouth in an even frown that didn’t wobble or twist as if he was about to cry. (He could have cried, he supposed. With pain like this, crying was an appropriate response, and damn those who thought that tears were for women; their voices were thankfully few, but Elrond had seen enough wrack and ruin in his life to disdain such an attitude wholeheartedly. But he could not cry. Sweat ran down his brow onto his face, pooling in his shirt collar, but his eyes were dry. Crying would have been cathartic, and Elrond thought that, perhaps, because crying would have been cathartic, the pain would not let him cry. This pain had been inflicted on him by an outside source, a source both outside his own body and outside the normal world as he knew it. The idea that he had been struck down with pain that had enough of a will that it wouldn’t let him cry was an outlandish one, but it wasn’t one that Elrond thought he could dismiss right out of hand—his left hand, he’d make sure.)

Elrond shook his head, prayed his frown would not seem to quaver too much, and prayed also that Celebrimbor would get his meaning, would not try to drag speech out of him now, when Elrond didn’t think he could have pieced together anything that wasn’t a guttural moan.

Celebrimbor did not reply, not in words. He stared at Elrond’s hand a moment longer, his long hair mostly obscuring his face, but not entirely obscuring the knitting he was putting into his brow with his own contemplation. Then, he was back on his feet, leaving Elrond to wonder bitterly for a moment if Celebrimbor had just decided to throw in the towel, go back to sleep, and leave Elrond to lie awake on his pallet for the rest of the night, cringing and hissing in mute pain.

But that was not so. Celebrimbor bent double to rifle through his pack, shifting what seemed like the entire contents of his pack before he finally came out with a long, thin bottle with the glint of steel, and what looked like a small set of measuring cups. Celebrimbor looked Elrond over for a long moment, his gaze uncomfortably piercing even when Elrond was so absorbed into his pain that he could register nearly nothing else. It felt like Celebrimbor was trying to pick him apart and examine his components; it felt a little like Elrond was completely undressed. His pale eyes, bright with the light of dead things, saw entirely too much.

But that moment passed, and Celebrimbor, grumbling something under his breath, yanked the stopper out of the bottle completely unaided and swished the bottle around a little bit, staring dubiously down the long, slender neck of the bottle, before pouring the dark liquid that issued forth into the second-smallest of the measuring cups.

He set the bottle and the other measuring cups aside, not bothering for now to stick the stopper back in the bottle, and came to sit back down at Elrond’s side. “This,” he said quietly, “will ease the worst of the pain, though if it is as bad as you seem to be feeling, it will not erase it entirely.” He raised an eyebrow, holding the cup away from Elrond as he surged forward to take it off of him. In a slightly raised voice, without the gentleness that Elrond had so often heard there, but not as harshly as Elrond had heard from the voices of others with similar timbres and inflections, “You will also sleep for the next several hours. I cannot say how many, exactly; you are hale, but you are also young, and this recipe was first made for the Calaquendi. It may affect you differently than it would me.”

At last, Celebrimbor handed the cup over to Elrond, who, though his heart had lifted considerably at being told that it was something that would ease his pain, hesitated. He stared down into the depths of the cup. Though the light of the lamp was bright indeed, it was not enough on its own to give Elrond a clear idea of the color of the liquid that Celebrimbor had poured out of the bottle. When he tilted the cup ever so slightly from side to side, he saw that the liquid had the consistency of wine, and the darkness of it wasn’t so far off from an exceptionally dark red wine, but…

Elrond forced himself to speak. “What is it?” The words crackled on his lips like he’d not spoken in weeks, or else had screamed so loud as to tear his throat.

At that, Celebrimbor pressed his hand to Elrond’s shoulder once more, giving it a gentle squeeze. Warmth crept from his skin through the fabric of Elrond’s shirt. He wished he could take more comfort from it, but the only thing that gave him comfort now was the promise of what glistened darkly in his cup. “I’ll tell you once you’ve woken.” Still no particular gentleness, but a little softer now, Elrond thought. “Now drink.”

Skepticism should have stayed his hand (heh, hand), but what was skepticism in the face of relief to this pain? Celebrimbor had not hurt him yet. And even if he did feel some desire, he’d have quite the time trying to explain it to Gil-galad once he returned to Lindon with an injured Elrond in tow, or if he just went back to Lindon without Elrond with him at all.

Elrond wasn’t worried. Of everything that had ever happened to him, he couldn’t honestly claim poisoning attempts among those things, and he didn’t expect it from Celebrimbor. There were ways that Celebrimbor could hurt him. But those would come without instruments such as this, and if they came, they would come without Celebrimbor ever being fully aware of what he was doing.

He brought the cup to his lips. As he did so, he caught a whiff of the liquid that Celebrimbor had poured out for him. It did indeed smell a little like wine, an especially fruity wine, but there was an undertone of something bitter there, something totally unlike the bitterness of alcohol.

Medicine was often bitter. Elrond tipped the cup back, and drank.

What had smelled bitter tasted _exceptionally_ bitter. Elrond had to fight back the urge to gag as he downed the contents of the cup, swallowing as much of it as he could in the first go, and making a face once he had swallowed it all, wishing more ardently than ever before in his life for his waterskin.

Celebrimbor had apparently anticipated that wish, handing him the waterskin as he took the cup off of him. “You’ll want to wash that out of your mouth now; once you let it stick, it can take days to get it out completely.”

Elrond nodded, taking a few deep swallows and marking himself grateful for the extra waterskins in his pack. “How long… until it…”

“Give it a few minutes, and you’ll start to feel the first effects.” Celebrimbor set his hands on both of Elrond’s shoulders, gently urging him back down. “Lie down. It’s better if you’re not sitting up when it hits you.”

Lying down felt welcome right now, if only because his body felt so weak that to spend a few minutes more might have totally ruined his strength. Elrond settled down onto his back, holding his right arm at an awkward angle from himself, splayed out crookedly so as to avoid where Celebrimbor was still kneeling at his side.

A few minutes later, Elrond felt as if days upon days of sleep were crashing down on him all at once. His body was leaden, his head as heavy as it had ever felt, his eyes straining to stay open.

“Will you…” He would never have tolerated such a slur in his voice, not even when drunk, but there was very little in Elrond capable of noting it now, let alone _criticizing_ it. He could not reach out; his arms were not working. Elrond could do nothing but stare entreatingly up at Celebrimbor with eyes that were fast drooping shut, mumbling “Will you…”

“I’ll be here,” Celebrimbor promised.

He was moving his lips to say more, but Elrond heard none of it. The last thing he felt before his drugged sleep carried him off was a hand pressing lightly into his hair. It had been a long time since he had last had anyone who’d stroke his hair as he fell asleep, but he had missed it, all the same. Not all things lost could go without being missed.

-0-0-0-

There were no dreams. He had been carried off to a place where even the earth-dreams could not reach him, so deep within his own mind that there was nothing there but himself. When Elrond finally came back to himself, body moored to the waking world, he felt every bit as leaden and sluggish as he did just before he lost consciousness, and though he could move his body minutely, there was no sitting up.

He was still lying on his back, still down in the kitchens where meals had once been made for the soldiers garrisoned at this castle, before the Nirnaeth had come and given all the choice of fleeing or drowning in a sea of tears. He was not lying directly beneath the lamp, and for that, Elrond was grateful, since staring directly up into that light would no doubt have grown painful after a while. Instead, blue light bathed the path of ceiling that he stared at. Though he was nearly totally immobile, there was a comfort, in knowing that he’d not been moved while he slept. He had grown to dislike when his surroundings when he was last awake were so vastly different from when he was freshly awoken after sleep. It was rare for that to be anything resembling a good sign.

His hand was…

There was still some pain. Celebrimbor had been as good as his word; for the sort of pain that Elrond was in, the concoction he had been given would not be enough to erase the pain entirely. There was still some pain, but it was not the unbearable agony that had seen Elrond curled up on his side however many hours ago it had been since he was last awake. Instead, it was _noticeable_ , yes, there was no denying that, but it felt more like the dull, sunken-in ache of a deep bruise, clinging and sullen. It was no longer a pain that could absorb everything of Elrond into it. It was no longer a pain that could make Elrond self-absorbed; finally, _finally_ , he could easily focus on all around him again.

Not that there was much to be looking at. The ceiling was a _ceiling_ , after all. Elrond could take comfort in its sturdiness, Elrond could wonder how long it had been holding up the bulk and the sheer, titanic weight of the ground floor of the castle for so long, but it was totally unadorned. Brick, unlike the earth floor upon which he lied, but still, there were only so many bricks within his field of vision for him to count. Elrond let his eyes fall shut again, and dozed, hoping that wherever the concoction had taken him before, that he had been carried so far into himself that even the earth-dreams could not reach him, they would take him there again.

-0-0-0-

He had a sense that, whenever it was that he next woke, it had not been very long since he had last fallen asleep. Abbreviated sleep was like that; you could always tell when it had been cut short, by the way your body protested at the sudden wrenching from slumber. He had slept for a few minutes, perhaps even twenty, but certainly not an hour.

And now, now, he _was_ fully awake, the heaviness of sleep still threaded into his body, but banished entirely from his mind. Also, Elrond’s stomach was grumbling with something close to a piteous whine attached to its voice. It would have been difficult to miss that, especially considering the sheer _volume_.

Celebrimbor still had not given him an explanation for what it was that he had given Elrond to drink. That Celebrimbor might well not have been aware that Elrond was even awake did not matter, in these first few moments of wakefulness, when alert mind was trapped in a sluggish cage of flesh. Elrond had no explanation for what it was that had taken so much of the pain from his hand and had bid him sleep for however long he had slept. That, by itself, was reason enough to put sleep aside entirely, and set his will to sitting up, the better to get that sought-after answer.

Sleep was still in his body, and that sleep, combined with just how much the pain in his hand had been alleviated, made him a little careless. Truly, the difference was remarkable. Before, if you were to tell Elrond that this was what it felt like when someone cut off one of your limbs, he would hardly have been surprised—he certainly would not have _contested_ it. But now, it really did feel like a deep, nasty bruise, at least when Elrond didn’t put any pressure on it.

When Elrond didn’t put any pressure on it. That part was key.

Elrond, in his attempt to sit up, tried to push himself into a sitting position using his hands as levers. That turned out almost instantly to have been a mistake—a jolt of white-hot pain lanced up his right arm, sending him toppling back down to the pallet with a labored moan, sucking in great gasps of air as the pain rattled in his lungs.

From somewhere else in the room, he heard the rhythmic thump of footsteps, and before he knew it, Celebrimbor was kneeling at his side, leaning over him with his loose hair falling in a cascade around his shoulders, nearly brushing against Elrond’s face.

“What happened?”

Elrond might have been annoyed by the urgency, as if he was a stupid child who couldn’t be left by himself for five minutes without getting into some sort of trouble, but the urgency had more energy than anything else that had clung to Celebrimbor’s voice for days. It was easy not to hold a grudge.

“I…” It was much easier now than it had been to form words, even though Elrond found his jaw sore from where he had been so long clenching his teeth (Had he been doing it in his sleep?). He had to take a moment to reflect on this, not to mention trying to ease the soreness out of his jaw, before he could go on. “…Nothing serious. I tried to sit up, and…” He started at his right hand, something close to betrayal rattling around in his throat.

Celebrimbor raised an eyebrow. “I did warn you.”

And Elrond was too tired in body to work himself up to snap in response. It seemed rather too frivolous a waste of energy. “So you did.”

“You should sit up slowly, anyways.” Celebrimbor slid his hands between Elrond’s back and his bedding, helping him up exactly as slowly as he thought was right, or so Elrond could only assume. Under normal circumstances, it would have been excruciatingly slow, but as Elrond was slowly pressed upwards into a sitting position, his head began to spin and his stomach churned so fiercely that he momentarily forgot his hunger, and he thought that there might be some wisdom in sitting up slowly after all. “You’ll make yourself sick if you aren’t careful, and then you would only feel worse.”

Elrond eyed him closely, searching for any sign of a chink he could pry open. “You sound as if you have had much experience of that brew.”

“Later. Now hush.”

Voice hot—not too tired for anger, it seemed, “ _You_ said—“

“I know what I said, Elrond. _Later_. You need to have something to eat and to drink, and I need to tell you some things before you can have that story out of me.” Celebrimbor’s brows knit, just deep enough to suggest pain. “Please.”

Elrond sucked in a sharp breath—and let it out hotly, nostrils flaring. He could hardly deny that his hunger was crawling up his belly like an angry lizard, hissing and spitting and demanding his attention every second. He’d be stronger on a full stomach, more able to pin Celebrimbor down and extract a full explanation from him—if the sudden introduction of food wasn’t enough by itself to make him vomit, anyways, and he _hoped_ it would not, so long as he made no sudden movements. “Fine, then. A bit of breakfast, and then you tell me what that was.”

“You would hardly let me get away _without_ having told you.”

“Just… Just let me eat my breakfast.”

Celebrimbor went and got Elrond’s waterskin and a pack of travel rations that would hopefully serve to sustain him rather than making him violently ill from all the salt and other preservatives that in many cases managed to erase their original tastes almost completely. There was a part of him that rankled at leaving someone else to fetch his meal for him. Unless he was at a feast or in an inn, when he would only have been in the way if he was trying to get his food himself, letting others bring his food to him did not sit terribly comfortably—and even with feasts, at the first one he had attended in Lindon, he actually _had_ tried to move around getting his own food (after the first helping, of course), until Erestor had finally steered him back to his seat, muttering in his ear all the while that it was such a blatant violation of feast etiquette (at least before the king had retired for the night and left the stragglers to pick up whatever morsels might be remaining on the table) and anyone would think that Elrond had been raised in a cave, and Erestor _knew_ he hadn’t been, he’d been there when Elrond and his brother were born and he knew better than to think that this was even remotely possible, not even Maedhros and Maglor would have raised him to think this acceptable, and then Erestor had just sort of spiraled off and down, and Elrond, irritated and hungry, had just stopped listening.

Anyways.

Under most circumstances, Elrond disliked it when other people fetched his meals for him, and even under that minority of circumstances when he found himself allowing it, it made him mildly uncomfortable, though he could push it down most of the times in favor of actually getting something warm to eat. It was… It felt like coddling. It felt like coddling, and except when there was no other choice, Elrond disliked being waited upon. Yes, he knew that to be an odd sentiment to be expressed by a prince, of all people, but that was just how he had been raised? His mother had been a queen, and the only servants in the house had been his and Elros’s nursemaid, and the kitchen maid who tried to make the scraps they had for food into something resembling actual meals. There had been more in the way of servants in Among Ereb and in the camps of the Fëanorians, but those had not been settings that inclined themselves towards feasts and luxurious meals in inns, not been settings that inclined themselves towards Elrond being too closely _waited on_.

He could dress himself and, though Elrond was not so skilled a cook that he would ever turn his nose up at a hot meal cooked by another, his hands and his feet worked well enough that he could carry himself over to a kitchen to make his own plate. If he could do it himself, he failed to see why he should make someone else do it for him.

But he couldn’t do it right now, could he? There had been times when he had been close to adulthood, times when he had been wounded after a skirmish and had been deemed unfit to rise from his bed (or pallet, more likely), and had been handed his meals, if there was food enough for a meal, instead of being permitted to get up to get it himself. He had put up with it now, however unwelcome it might have been. He would just have to put up with it now, as well.

(Was there a part of him that could ever truly accept it? Elrond did not know. He knew that there were many who told him that it was his lot to accept it, that it was his lot to make his peace with the idea of it—his brother had certainly given him a few funny looks during Elrond’s last visit to Elenna. Perhaps—

Someday. Perhaps, someday.)

Celebrimbor returned to him with his waterskin, and with a packet of travel rations wrapped in pale blue wax paper patterned with yellow poppies. Such pretty coverings for such disappointing ‘food’—Elrond wondered sometimes at the sense of humor of the cook or whoever else it had been who had packed Elrond’s provisions for him. (Yes, he was _aware_ that he had allowed someone else to handle his meals for him there. Travel rations were something entirely different from proper food. Elrond wanted to spend at little time as possible worrying over his travel rations as possible, and certainly did not want to be overly involved in the process of deciding on the contents of his own, dissatisfying meals for nearly the entirety of his journey.) But on this morning, Elrond was hungry enough that even travel rations looked halfway decent. Not totally decent, mind, but when he was this famished, very little besides boiled shoe leather did not look at least halfway decent.

He was subjected today to a chunk of shriveled bread that Elrond thought might once have been a biscuit but had which, by some unknown process, been rendered to something more akin to a rock, a few equally shriveled and rock-hard links of sausage, a lump of sharp, pungent cheese, and a separate section of tied cheesecloth containing dried and sugared figs. Elrond thought with special longing of the piping hot dumplings stuffed with quark he had eaten on the way to the quays. Anything hot, anything _fresh_ , no matter how plain, would have been welcome to him—as long as it wasn’t so heavily salted or sugared, so long as it wasn’t dry as a rock and hard as one too, he wouldn’t show himself picky.

_How well am I going to take to traveling, if I can’t even stand the food that travelers eat when they can’t find an inn or a friendly homestead?_ Elrond wondered for the first time, as he mouthed the once-biscuit, trying to render it something soft enough to chew. He had been so bent on traveling, and he couldn’t even stand travelers’ foods; he’d be an absolute laughingstock.

But if there were not inns on the roads, there would be soon enough, he could only imagine, for the wars were over, Morgoth was vanquished, and shy Edhil and Men might now flourish in this new Age, and spread out, and if they spread out, they would need to travel, and if they needed to travel, they would need inns.

Perhaps that assessment was a bit optimistic. For the next two hundred years, at least. Still, Elrond could hope. He couldn’t hope about important things, but about things like this, silly things, perhaps…

He ate quickly, and not only because of his yawning hunger, not only because the sooner he ate all of this unsatisfying ‘food,’ the sooner he would be done with it and would no longer have to taste it upon his tongue. They were not insignificant reasons, but they were not the _only_ reasons. The _biggest_ reason was sitting across from him, watching him closely as he ate, as if he expected Elrond to topple over in the middle of one of his sausage links.

At least Celebrimbor wasn’t trying to go anywhere. At least he wasn’t trying to disappear into the passageways that led in and out of the kitchens, avoiding the questions Elrond wanted answers to entirely. _He said he would be here_. But that had only been a promise to stay until Elrond awoke. Elrond was not _, could not_ be naïve enough to believe otherwise. Surely he wouldn’t—

_Do not tread that path_.

No. Elrond swallowed his last bite of cheese, praying that the heat he felt slowly crawling up his neck was only a figment of his imagination, or that if it was not, it would go unnoticed by Celebrimbor. He could not trace those paths, not back to their source. He would find nothing there, nothing to grasp on, nothing to hold onto, nothing that would not be dripping blood. No matter how much he might wish it otherwise, that was how it must be.

Elrond set the wax paper aside, took a deep swig of water, and fixed Celebrimbor in an expectant stare. “There were things you wished to say to me?”

Celebrimbor started, as if he had been wrested from some deep reverie—given that he had been staring at Elrond the whole time, Elrond would decline to imagine (and pray that the thoughts did not creep up on him in an idle moment; that would be entirely disruptive), so long as Celebrimbor at last began to explain himself. He started, and then he nodded to himself, swallowing unexpectedly hard, given that he had been called upon only to explain the nature of a medicine he had been carrying on him for the journey. “First of all—“ and there was something so apologetic in his voice that Elrond’s back was up immediately “—I can’t give you any more of that as long as we’re on the island, even if the pain returns to you in full before we have reached the port.”

Elrond, not being at all uneducated on medicine, thought he understood what Celebrimbor was getting at here. It was… no, he did not look forward to it, if the pain _did_ come back in full once the medicine wore off, but it was not entirely unexpected, when he stopped to think about it. Still, it bore asking after: “Why not?”

Celebrimbor shrugged miserably. “It will linger in your body for days, even without a second dose. You need to be as alert and able as possible when we go back down the hill; I can’t carry you, not in the dark, not down that path, not when I need one hand on my lamp at all times. I…” He paused, voice now markedly stilted. “… I do hope that you will find the pain lessened, once the medicine begins to wear off. The pain, I think, is a consequence of the numbness leaving your hand; perhaps it will pass as quickly as the numbness did?”

That was… That was certainly quite optimistic. But Elrond did not fancy going back down the hill with his hand as good as useless, because to put any pressure on it at all was to induce agony well beyond his own past experience. He nodded silently, not trusting anything he said not to side-track Celebrimbor, perhaps deliberately on the latter’s part.

“You also need to drink plenty of water while the medicine still lingers in your body—more than you normally would, were it not present. I will have to check the old well and see if the water is still present, if it is still safe to drink or if it has since been fouled. If that fails, well, it’s been raining quite heavily, and that water must surely have gathered somewhere. I can start a fire and boil it, if need be.” He picked at his hand, raking his fingernails across the backs of his knuckles as if he expected to find something other than his own skin just beneath the surface. After a jittery breath, “You won’t be fit for much today. When I looked at your face, you seemed to be in such agony that I gave you a somewhat larger dose than would normally be prescribed. Your hand… how is your hand—besides too sore to put pressure on, that is.”

“Like a fresh bruise,” Elrond answered him, after another swig of water; the water, for however long it might have been sitting in his canteen, still tasted as sweet as any spring water he had ever drank, or any water he had ever put his hands out for beneath a clear, cold waterfall. “A deep one. If it was an actual bruise, I would say that I needed to seek the attentions of a surgeon, but as of right now, I wonder if an exorcist might not be more appropriate.”

Celebrimbor raked his fingernails across the back of his hand a little harder. “I will seek out an exorcist for you if it seems as if the spirit latched onto your body more severely than simply interfering with you hand. Otherwise, they’re not worth the trouble.”

Considering what the ghost had been doing to _him_ , he might consider getting an exorcist for himself, but with that attitude, Elrond didn’t think there was much hope. Well, one could only hope that if the typical signs of a houseless spirit trying to seek for a house not its own started to manifest within him, they would not do so until _after_ they had reached dry land; the sailors had been leery enough of the island that Elrond did not like to think of how they might react to signs of possession in one of the passengers on their ship, even if the voyage was to last mere hours, rather than days.

“But it is better than it was? You can at least _talk_ , I see.”

Elrond rolled his eyes. “Yes, I can talk. You may soon come to regret that speech has returned to me, if you do not soon tell me what I wish to know.”

Elrond’s words had come out lighter than he had intended. He had thought, at the last moment, to be sure, that perhaps bluntly and directly _demanding_ the truth out of Celebrimbor might not be quite the way to go, not after he had dawdled and prevaricated so much already. Elrond disliked having things kept from him, especially when those ‘things’ consisted of knowledge that he considered necessary to a full understanding of his situation, both past, present, and future. He had taken the medicine; therefore, he deserved to know what it was. He had drunk deep of a liquid whose nature and origins he knew not, taking it on faith that Celebrimbor would not harm him, taking it on faith that harm would not come to him anyways if it turned out that Celebrimbor was less than fully familiar with the actual purpose of what he had given to Elrond, if it turned out that Celebrimbor was less than fully familiar with what constituted a proper dosage. After that, he thought that he was owed an explanation.

But Elrond had conducted several interviews in the name of gathering information in his time, and he had learned—not quickly, to be sure, and that, of all things, stung him keenly—that the same approach could not be applied to every subject. There were those who responded best to blunt, direct questions, who seemed almost to relish a borderline confrontational approach from their interviewer; these subjects did best when they had something they could whet themselves against, when Elrond provided them with a means to sharpen the teeth of their stories against his own curiosity and impatience. There were also those interview subjects who responded _incredibly_ poorly to being asked outright, either at the beginning of the interview, or all throughout. If Elrond wanted to get anything useful out of them, he was obliged to let them talk their way around the subject, either until they were at last ready to speak of it directly, or until they had provided a clear enough picture of the things surrounding the subject that Elrond could use the negative space effectively enough to guess at what his intended topic of conversation consisted of. They could not be moved by impatience, unless you counted being moved to get up from the table and leave through that door, sometimes with promises never to return. They must be treated more gently.

“Was this often given to soldiers during the War of Wrath?” Elrond asked carefully, head tilted slightly to one side and not quite meeting Celebrimbor’s gaze head on. “I don’t remember coming across it.”

No, he wouldn’t have, would he? Elrond and Elros had only been in the thickest part of the fighting for the last few months, when it was no longer possible for their caretakers, accursed fugitives they might be, to avoid being sucked into that war. But it made sense that the concoction would be something that had been born from war. Yes, accidents did happen, even in peacetime, but the Exiles were far away from Valinor and the healing that the Rodyn offered there—and for the entire time that they had called Beleriand their home, the Exiles were one way or another at war.

Elrond was not a stranger to sedatives. He had taken them more than once in his time; he had brewed more than one in his time, as well. This was entirely unlike any other he had drank or brewed—much, _much_ stronger than anything the very few healers Elrond had been acquainted with in his childhood would have had the materials to concoct—but the principle was the same. And while Elrond had only joined the _true_ fighting in the last few months of the War of Wrath, Celebrimbor had been in the thick of it from the beginning.

But to Elrond’s surprise, Celebrimbor shook his head. “Not this particular recipe. It was rather more isolated.”

“Only used in the east of Beleriand, then?” It was a remarkably effective sedative, but if there was something that would have marked out its makers as having once followed a Son of Fëanor, perhaps they would have kept knowledge of it to themselves, and stick to other brews, instead.

And once again, Celebrimbor shook his head. Addressing the floor more than he addressed Elrond, “It was Caranthir’s invention; we never used it outside of the family. He first made it for Maedhros, when the pain from his torments on Thangorodrim were too much to bear unaided.”

Elrond touched his right hand reflexively, only realizing what he was doing when a little spark of pain ignited under his skin. He winced, folding his left hand in his lap.

Muttering at his shoes, Celebrimbor went on, “I had need of it on—on Balar. I may have taken a little too much from time to time, but I became familiar with the proper dosage, in time.”

“On Balar…”

At the first, Elrond did not understand.

A moment later, he was _wishing_ for such ignorance.

Once again, Elrond found himself addressing Celebrimbor carefully, but for a very different reason. “Gil-galad told me that that had been a _light_ stabbing.” But there was no such thing as a _light_ stabbing, Elrond knew better than to take a tale of such at face value, and he should _really_ have asked more questions in the moment.

Celebrimbor lifted his head, only to stare off to the side at a patch of dark wall. Considering the expression that Elrond had caught fulminating on his face in that split-second when they had been facing each other completely, perhaps that was best. “Ereinion was a child,” he said, the bitterness thick in his voice once more, and this time, if only just this one time, Elrond did not have to guess for even a moment at the cause. “I did not wish to frighten him. And Círdan feared the consequences, if my attacker or someone else emboldened by their actions knew me to be so vulnerable as I actually was. The deception was necessary. I will not apologize for it.”

And Elrond had not expected him to. But it was clear that however much Celebrimbor might have believed the deception necessary, that he wished also that it had _not_ been necessary—there was a faint wobble to his mouth, a faint patchy glow to his cheeks, that spoke of just how _much_ Celebrimbor wished it had not been necessary. And Elrond…

He’d not thought too much about it. When Gil-galad had told him, he had been horrified; of course he had been. There was no Edhel on this earth who did not recoil from the _thought_ of an Edhel killing another Edhel, and quite frankly, Elrond thought that he was in a better position than most to know just how true that was. That someone had stabbed Celebrimbor purely for the offense of sharing his father’s blood and resembling him too obviously for it to be disguised, that had painted for Elrond a stark picture of the state of affairs on Balar after the survivors of the second Sack of Menegroth reached it—and Duileth’s sheltering of the attacker painted an even starker one—but he had not stopped to think of the impact it had on Celebrimbor _himself_.

There was little choice but to think of it now. There was little else that Elrond could do, but think of it now, little he could do but let the thoughts drown out everything else that might otherwise have been in his head.

The thoughts were diverse and many-legged, but the one strain of thought that Elrond’s mind kept returning to, over and over, as it pulled all other thoughts into its gravity, was this: what was it to be so hated for something so thoroughly out of your control, that someone whom you did not know felt perfectly empowered to stab you unprovoked, most likely with the intent of killing you? What more, what was it to be so hated for something so thoroughly out of control, that when you tried to seek justice for your wounding, the greater part of your community thought your near-murderer more worthy of protection than you?

Elrond was hardly surprised by Celebrimbor’s bitterness. He was _more_ surprised by the fact that Celebrimbor hadn’t just left the Isle of Balar behind him the moment he was fit to board a ship for the mainland. The Iathrim in the Lisgardh wouldn’t have been any more happy to see him, but there had been a dire need of craftsmen in the first few years that that refugee camp was enlarged by the presence of Iathrim refugees, and it would only be a few years more before the Gondolindrim came to join them there—Celebrimbor would have had plenty of Exiles to live with there, and while things would no doubt have been a bit awkward there, as well, considering that Turgon had very publically denounced the House of Fëanor after the second Sack of Menegroth, Celebrimbor would likely have been in considerably less danger of one of the Gondolindrim _stabbing_ him.

It did occur to Elrond to be curious as to just why Celebrimbor had not left. Considering that one could reasonably assume that his safety and his very life were in danger from his fellow Edhil as long as he stayed on the island, it _was_ considerably stranger that Celebrimbor had not left the island behind him after he had recovered from the attack.

It did occur to Elrond to be curious as to why Celebrimbor had stayed on the island. He could not find anywhere within him the will to _ask_ after the reason why. There were some things that were sacrosanct and inviolate, and there were other things that were _not_ sacrosanct, but were every bit as inviolate. There were some things that should _never_ be touched.

_I wonder how I would fare, if I was hated so much…_

So, if the Iathrim had been a little less numerous by the end of the First Age, and people were less intimidated by the fact that so many of Thingol’s most avid supporters were still living and still held positions of power in Ennor, that could very easily have been Elrond’s fate. Perhaps not to the extent that someone would think it appropriate and _right_ to stab him completely unprovoked, since Thingol had only ever allowed Edhil to die, rather than sending his men to kill them outright, or killing them outright himself, but that was just the thing. Elrond could not imagine that there weren’t a great _many_ Edhil who resented dearly that Thingol’s refusal to open his borders to the Exiles, under any circumstances, had resulted indirectly in the deaths of so many of their number. Even Celebrimbor, who had never otherwise evinced such a grudge had hardly seemed _sorry_ over the marchwardens who had been caught in the flames of the Dagor Bragollach.

Elrond knew that any animus over Thingol and those who upheld his policies after him was, if not entirely well-deserved, at least entirely _understandable_. But he did not think he would have borne such animus falling upon him, who was not alive to see Doriath even in its diminishment, who had had no part in such policies, with anything resembling happiness or grace. He could well imagine how he would have resented it. There was already so much he resented, regarding shadows whose sources spilled out from the Houses of the Dead.

He could well imagine how Celebrimbor, who had taken no part in his father, uncles, or grandfather’s wrongdoings, must resent it.

“I’m sorry.”

He would not, could not regret the words. They were out of his mouth so impulsively, but not every impulse was evil or ill-conceived. It was the only appropriate thing to say. He would not regret it. He chose not to regret it.

Not even Celebrimbor’s reaction could make him regret it.

Celebrimbor’s gaze, until then drifting into the middle distance off to his side, to the point where Elrond was not certain whether Celebrimbor even _saw_ the wall he was looking at, snapped to Elrond’s face. His eyes were not focused at first, not focused on anything solid, and yet the brightness within them was so intense that Elrond had to fight to meet his gaze squarely, had to fight to push down the sudden wild fear that if he looked into Celebrimbor’s eyes too long, the reflected light of dead things could burn him and render him insensate to all that lived. Needless to say, when Celebrimbor’s eyes finally focused, the effect was only worse.

Perhaps it was the fear of burning that provoked Elrond to speak once more, “Does this surprise you?”

A strange not-smile spasmed on Celebrimbor’s mouth, giving off no light, certainly not any that could match his eyes. “I… Hmm. I suppose it should not. You do not seem to have ever had much patience for injustice.”

Elrond shrugged his shoulders primly. “I think that we should all receive what we deserve.” And if he could pin down exactly what he deserved, besides all of the things he could never have back and would likely never have had to start with, even had several things in his early life been different, things would be much easier for him to sort out for himself. “If that is tied much to justice, then so be it.”

Celebrimbor snorted. “I sincerely hope that what we get is _not_ actually what we deserve. Can you imagine what it would be like, if everything that had happened to us happened because we deserved it? I don’t think I could bear it.”

“Of _course_ your mind went there,” Elrond muttered, mostly to try to banish the image Celebrimbor had conjured from _his_ mind—it was not something he particularly cared to contemplate, not this day or any other day.

“At any rate, thank you.” Elrond felt the pressure of Celebrimbor’s fingertips against the top of his left hand, before he saw Celebrimbor reaching towards him. His fingers were warm, and gentle, a delicate heat that Elrond would have liked to have envelop him, had he been able to bear the feeling of envelopment, been able to bear the intimacy of it. “There are few who know of that… that _incident_ , and it…” He broke off, jaw working behind his skin. “…For others to know it…”

He felt flayed open, Elrond could only assume. Did they not all feel flayed open, whenever they learned that someone else knew more about them than they had thought they did?

Was it…

Was it really as comforting as all that? Elrond had shied away from the pain, even in those rare moments when he longed for the pain of incision and flensing, if it meant that he could be seen. He could not imagine how comforting it might be or not be. He could not imagine that the comfort would be greater than the pain; what seemed more likely was that it would all go as he had earlier imagined, that when the scar tissue was ripped off, he would bleed and bleed and bleed until there was nothing left inside of him but dry bones that could not sustain a husk of a body devoid of blood, and uncaring spectators might divine his story from the words written on the floor in his blood, but whatever they derived from it, he would not feel it himself. That did not sound so comforting. That did not sound comforting at all. There was no comfort to be found in oblivion.

Was that what Celebrimbor sought, then? Oblivion? Or was there something else he thought he could get from it, something that would preclude bleeding and bleeding and bleeding until sniggering spectators were reading out every last niggling detail of his life on the blood-soaked, blood-written floor?

Elrond thought of links and bonds. He thought of those that dripped blood, and could never be cleaned of the blood, for without it, they would never have been forged. He thought also of those links and those bonds that did not drip blood, for they had been forged in something cleaner, forged in something less violent. He wondered which of those bonds, those that dripped blood or those that did not, would prove stronger and more resilient. Eventually, he managed to stop thinking about it. Eventually, he managed to dismiss the thoughts as irrelevant to him. But still, they lingered. They left a bittersweet taste in his mouth, like the memory of the embrace of one of the beloved dead. It… Elrond feared where it would take him, if he indulged it too often. (But he wanted to. He did. Solitude could sustain no one forever.)

“I want to go outside,” he said suddenly, a little sooner than the thought had solidified in his mind.

“If you can walk without stumbling, I will try to help you outside. But I know the brew better than you do. I will be watching; if you show any signs of weakening, I will bring you back here.”

“You need to find water, don’t you?” Elrond asked him, suddenly feeling testy—oh, look, something that actually made _sense_ to him; what a novelty. “You would have had to go outside anyways.”

“It was not a _refusal_ , Elrond. It was just… Alright. Try to stand up. If you cannot do that on your own, I will not let you join me outside.”

Fair enough, though Elrond still rankled at such an imposition. He did not appreciate being spoken to in any way that suggested that he was a child who could not be trusted with simple tasks. Whether or not Celebrimbor had meant to imply such was irrelevant; as long as the implication was there, he would bristle at it.

_I can stand_. _I have rested, I have eaten, and the pain is less. I can stand. I can stand on my feet, without risking a fall_.

So long as he did it slowly, he would be fine. He would be fine.

Elrond slowly unfolded his legs, carefully monitoring his own bodily reactions to such. His body felt stiff, but his head did not spin, his vision did not dim, and his stomach did not churn. He put his left hand on his knee, trying to use it as a sort of lever; it was a little awkward, considering he did not dare to do the same thing with his right hand, for fear of the pain causing him to topple over once more and Celebrimbor deeming that disqualifying.

It took longer, so much longer than it should have, for him to stand. It was _embarrassingly_ long; Elrond doubted that even when he was a tiny child, just learning how to stand and crawl and walk, that it would have taken him so long for him to stand on his own two feet. But he managed it, eventually, however unsteady and boneless his legs might feel beneath him.

Whether he would be able to _walk_ on these legs was a different matter, Elrond mused, his chest filling with a mix of ruefulness and frustration that felt as if it should be caustic enough to burn, and yet sat supine within him, doing no such thing, most likely waiting for the moment when it would be most inopportune for him. Probably when his legs gave out from under him, and he was toppling down onto a hard, heavy landing on the floor.

Hopefully, he wouldn’t do that until after they had gotten outside. If Elrond’s legs finally decided to give out from under him when they were outside, Celebrimbor might just decide he needed to _stay_ out there until he had gotten enough of his strength back to make the walk back down into the kitchens. Celebrimbor _had_ said that he couldn’t carry Elrond, not in the dark, not when he needed his lamp. He had been speaking of the bowels of what had once been Himring Hill, of course (and Elrond was not looking forward to the descent, not if he was still feeling like this when it came time to leave), but perhaps that would extend to the lightless passageways connecting this kitchen to the outside world, as well. One could hope.

However silly that hope might feel.

Himself, Elrond devoted his attention to standing as straight and as tall as he was able, dividing his weight as evenly as he could between his two gelatin-like legs, so that at least the risk of listing to one side would be somewhat lessened. _If I walk very slowly, then perhaps…_

Or perhaps Celebrimbor had been satisfied with the fact that Elrond could stand on his own, and would be taking pity on him requiring the rest of what was required to reach that courtyard where they had eaten their supper the night before.

“Come on, then.” After Celebrimbor took the lamp from its hook on the ceiling, he approached Elrond and offered him his arm. He was not smiling, but there was a softening in his jaw that might have presaged it, had they been back in Lindon. “It will not be such a short walk for you, not in the state you find yourself in now.”

“I… Very well.”

This felt different than when Elrond had impulsively taken Celebrimbor’s hand in the bowels of the hill. It was different to be offered something and accept it than it was to take it, impulsively, with no thought until afterwards until the other would react to the taking. Elrond had expected for this to feel alien to him, for it to be a matter of Celebrimbor’s elbow digging into his side or the weight of his arm dragging on him and making it more difficult to walk, for it to not feel natural, for it to be like putting half of his body into a vanished past.

It did not feel alien at all. Instead, leaning against Celebrimbor’s long, lean body as they started to make their way down that narrow, lightless passageway felt as natural as anything else he had ever done, felt like sinking into a present that had enough room for Elrond, but only if he learned to accept things that had always struck him before as too much of a risk to accept.

It did feel natural.

It almost felt like…

Elrond was glad for the darkness, even as the darkness was something they must struggle through, even with the lamp. It gave him the space to think in peace. It gave him the privacy of thinking, without Celebrimbor ever getting a good look at his face.

He wondered, briefly, if he liked it. But that, Elrond thought, might be beside the point. It had been a long time since he could like anything like this uncomplicatedly. His mother had been torn apart by duty and the distractions of the Silmaril and had been half-eaten by all of her cares and all of her obligations, and by the time she could be who she was at home, who she was at home had very little left over for her sons. His father had been a non-entity. Maglor and Maedhros had been—Hmm. All the world knew what they had _been_. Only sometimes did Elrond wish he could have gone on in ignorance of it. It would have been impossible to go on in ignorance of it forever, not unless he simply committed himself to never coming among the Edhil again, and that would have been like a death in and of itself. Not a death like Maedhros’s death, but a death like the sort of death Maglor had brought upon himself—to die in stories and in present memory, even if not in flesh. It was still a death. It just happened that the corpse’s heart was still beating.

And Elros, _Elros_ …

There was distance, there. Elrond had not bothered to count the number of miles across the Sea between the quays in Mithlond and the eastern shores of Elenna, though Elros likely had the number memorized by now, along with the number of leagues that made up the jutting, five-pronged shorelines of his new kingdom. But it was not just the miles that lied between them. Elros _had_ his kingdom, and his people, and his wife, Sírien, in particular—no children, yet, but Elrond had no doubt that they were trying for children, for Elros was a king of Men, now, and kings of Men must have heirs to perpetuate their lines after they were gone.

Elros… Elros had chosen a different path. Their paths were different, now, perhaps not so obviously at the first instance, but they would spiral out so far in time that they would one day be totally invisible to each other, totally out of reach. That process was underway already, and it could not be stopped.

They were different, now. They could never be the same again. Elrond could be standing in his brother’s presence, could be looking into his brother’s face, could be slinging his arms across his brother’s back as his brother did the same to him, and there would still be that distance, indelible, that would keep him from ever again enjoying the closeness that had been theirs as children. There would always be something standing between them—a kingdom, a crown, a wife, a child or children, death, the paths their spirits would tread after death.

Sometimes, embracing Elros felt like embracing a ghost. Elrond had the same sense of nostalgia and grief and longing that anyone would feel, trying to hold to them something irrevocably gone. Elros’s heart still beat, but there were times when even that felt like an illusion. Elros’s embrace had ceased to comfort him years ago.

But this, _this_ , this was something else entirely. The touch of someone who was present, who was living and not dead, someone who had not been given the choice of his spirit’s destination but who would certainly have chosen to remain _here_ , someone who was not dwindling (as slowly as infamy allowed) out of songs and story and the memories of Edhil and Men, that was something else entirely. There was no nostalgia and grief and longing mingling here to birth the poison of slow desolation. It was a touch allowed to be itself, without bloodied, mangled shadows hurrying after it.

That must be why it was so heady, or so Elrond tried to tell himself, for the first few moments they spent struggling through the dark in passageways that seemed designed to be traversed going single-file. That was what he told himself—it was heady because of the _novelty_ , and for no other reason. But such an explanation tasted stale in Elrond’s mouth, and it was not long before he felt forced to discard it.

Let us be honest, then.

Left in the void of that first failed dictate was a silence begging to be filled, a want begging to be named, and Elrond obliged it on neither point. He knew—Yes. At this point, he knew. At this point, he thought he even _wanted_. But there was still some part of him that shied away, determined to see even things that originated within himself as a threat. There was still some part of himself that whispered that to seriously attach himself to anything would leave him half-eaten and yet untouched as his mother had been, even though he _knew_ that that was not how it had worked in Elwing’s case, knew that the burdens of being queen in such bleak circumstances made his concerns so paltry and so airy by comparison…

He wanted to sink into it, that touch. He wanted to sink into it so deep that he could no longer feel the air of the surface on his skin. As Elrond had thought earlier, it was just as well that it was so dark in this passageway, and that Celebrimbor’s attention was so firmly fixed on reaching the door that he would never have thought to hold the lamp up to Elrond’s face. Elrond did not think that his present expression would withstand scrutiny. Not at all.

This time, Elrond heard the rain before Celebrimbor pushed the door open and the smell of rain and the sight of it reached Elrond’s senses. He would mark that as a small victory—normally, too small a victory even to be noticed, let alone _counted,_ but considering that he was half-walking, half being dragged towards the door, he would take what victories he could. Who knew when he would enjoy another victory again?

The sight when Celebrimbor pushed the door open bore out Elrond’s expectations. It was not raining as hard as it had been at other occasions on this island, but the rain was coming down hard and steady enough that Elrond didn’t suppose that it would be stopping any time soon. The rain would be with them until sunset, at least, and perhaps as long as tomorrow morning, if they were unlucky—and considering the way Elrond’s luck had been running for as long as he had been on this island…

(The library did not count. The library had been an incredible find, but considering the state of Elrond’s hand, he thought that things balanced out more towards a lack of luck than an abundance of it.)

It was not raining as hard as it had been, but still, silver sheets ran over the sides of the veranda down onto the overgrown grass of the courtyard. “It will be much easier to collect water, then,” Celebrimbor murmured. “All I have to do is find something relatively clean and set it out.”

Elrond stared at him. “You didn’t know it was raining?”

At that, Celebrimbor almost smiled—but not quite. “I did say I would stay, didn’t I?”

“I…” Something that might have been a smile was threatening to break across Elrond’s lips, though his bewilderment was great enough to quash it entirely. “…I suppose you did.”

And perhaps that was only prudent. After all, if you give a medicine to someone who has never taken that medicine before, and in a dosage that you think might be just a little too much, it was prudent to stick around and watch their reactions, prudent to stick around and make certain that their reactions to that medicine were not adverse. But Elrond had been asleep for, it was clear, _hours_ , and after a while it must have become clear that he had responded well to the medicine. When that much was clear, if Celebrimbor had decided he wanted to go outside for a little while, stretch his legs, attend to himself, surely he could have done so confident that Elrond would not wake while he was gone.

Or maybe he hadn’t been confident. Or maybe he had been confident, and he had simply decided he hadn’t wanted to. Maybe he had simply stayed, because he did not want to take the risk that Elrond would awake alone, to find himself so weak and so sluggish that at the first, he could not even sit up without another’s aid.

That was… The thought of it made Elrond feel warm, in a way that had nothing to do with the humid heat that beat on him from all sides, out here under the veranda, staring out at the incredibly overgrown courtyard and the barely half-visible fountain in its center. It took him a while to think that he should push down the warmth, and he never quite got around to doing so.

“Have you been experiencing any problems with your vision?” Celebrimbor asked Elrond, as the latter eased down towards a sitting position on the ground with his back pressed up against the wall for a support. “Does anything seem dimmer than it should, or hazy? Have you been seeing double at all?”

Elrond shook his head. “No, nothing like that. My vision is entirely unaffected.”

He would think that the long hours he had spent sleeping might have had some impact on his vision. Staring out at the patch of sky visible from the courtyard, the clouds completely obscured the sky, but the cloud cover was not so thick as to render all report of the sky beyond the clouds impossible. Those clouds, a deep, dense gray like wool stained with coal dust, showed no color but their own gray, except for a patch close to the center of the sky. There, the clouds glowed a bright, troubled golden, as if a fire had been lit behind them—and given Anor’s disposition, perhaps that was not so far off the mark. From the position of the sun, Elrond would say that they were not so far off from noontide. He had been sleeping long indeed.

He would have thought that that abnormally long sleep would have told somehow on his vision. Whenever Elrond had woken up after a long night of sleep after a particularly raucous sleep, on those days when the court was just not inclined to get up as they normally would and go about their business, there would be a few moments when he woke up when he had to blink rapidly, several times, before his vision would clear entirely. Granted, he had typically drank considerably more strong southern wine than was typically considered wise (thanks so much to Thranduil for egging him on) the night before, during those nights of raucous feasting, and that wine, unlike the concoction that Celebrimbor had given him during the night, had precious little medicinal applications beyond serving as a primitive painkiller if no proper sedatives were available, but Elrond thought also that the wine was probably _not_ so strong as the sedative he had been given during the night. Either way, Elrond’s past experiences had inclined him towards regarding abnormally long sleep as something that could skew his vision, even if only for the first few moments.

Perhaps it was because he had woken from his sedative-induced sleep in such a dark place. Yes, there was the lamp, but it did not dangle _directly_ overhead, especially not where Elrond had moved his bedding before going to bed the night before. When he had woken the morning after raucous feasts in Lindon, there was morning sunlight pouring in through his chamber windows, falling across his bed and generally just exacerbating an already pretty bad hangover into something that Elrond honestly thought would be less painful if it was a pain born from having had his head bashed open with the butt of a spear. Elrond was probably not in a good position right now to speculate on the reasons why his own sight was so clear from the very beginning. He would content himself with the idea that it was because he had woken in such a gloomy place, and the light directly overhead was gentle enough that he had had time to adjust before he had tried to sit up.

“Huh.” Apparently, it was not Celebrimbor’s experience after imbibing to wake up immediately clear-eyed, either, though whether that was limited to the sedative or also applied to when Celebrimbor indulged in whatever was his preferred alcohol, Elrond could not guess, and would not be asking at this juncture. Celebrimbor knelt down in front of Elrond, staring intently into his face with a slight frown playing about his lips. “Perhaps the dosage wasn’t so high for you as all that.”

Elrond raised an eyebrow. He should not have been pursuing this line of questioning—what was the point, when they were totally unable to do any tests out here, without experts or the proper materials?—but there was something in him that felt giddy and unmoored and inclined towards lightness, and that freed his tongue more than he might have otherwise allowed it. “Have you not fared so well? I thought the Calaquendi were hardier than that.”

Elrond did not know just how old Celebrimbor had been when the Darkening came for him. That thought put a little of the lightness out of him, gave him back a little of the lead that had been his for what felt like his entire life (There must have been a time when he was so young that he did not know what it was to live the way he did, in the sort of world that he did, but that time had been so long that he no longer recalled it). Elrond did not know how old Celebrimbor had been when the Darkening had come over Valinor and violence had finally upended the peace of the land the Rodyn had promised would always be tranquil and shattered that peace upon the blind floor. It was self-evident that Celebrimbor had played no part in the Kinslaying at Alqualondë—there were many in the royal court who would never stop bringing it up, if Celebrimbor had bloodied his hands in the city of the Falmari, and Elrond did not think that Celeborn in particular would be half as friendly with Celebrimbor as he was—and from that, Elrond could only assume that Celebrimbor had been a child at the time of the flight from Valinor, and a child young enough to have been incapable of taking part in a battle, at that. Celebrimbor would have known only a scant few years of eternal light, and many of those would likely have been spent in Formenos, where the light, at least according to the stories Elrond had been told, was not so brilliant as it was in Tirion. Did that… did that have some sort of an effect? Did the Calaquendi have to linger in the full light of the Trees for a certain amount of time in order to reap the full benefits of it? Elrond could not begin to guess, and given how the Calaquendi’s obsession with the Trees could grate upon him, he was not certain that he wanted to ask.

Perhaps he should not have brought it up, though. Elrond resisted the urge to fidget, considering that he probably would have started doing it with his right hand out of reflex, but he could not quite quell his anxiety. He had no intention of asking, either about the light of the Trees or Celebrimbor’s age when he gazed upon that light for the last time, but he could not shake the feeling that he should not have brought it up.

Celebrimbor, on the other hand, did not seem to feel any real resentment at whatever the almost-gibe might imply of him. “Hmm, the light we lived in was potent, true, but I _think_ —“ he seemed almost like himself, now, himself as he was in Lindon, but there was something frenetic to the note of cheer in his voice that marked out the strain it put on him to express such, the strain that made it somewhat less than whole-hearted “—that the blood of the Maiar might be somewhat _more_ potent, don’t you?”

Under other circumstances, Elrond might have bristled, but he did not quite remember himself in the face of the relief that Celebrimbor had assumed even a semi-translucent shadow of his former self, that he was engaging with him in such a way, and as it was, he merely rolled his eyes. “Several generations removed. You’ll find the blood of the Maiar quite diluted within me.”

The gifts granted to Lúthien and Elwing by the blood of the Maiar were quite apparent. In Dior, in Eluréd and Elurín, they had never revealed themselves, but their presence could be assumed, even if they had simply remained nascent until such time as it was entirely true late for the gifts of Maiarin blood to reveal themselves to the world. And then there was Elrond, Elrond with his bizarre dreams when he slept on the ground, and nothing else. If that was all that the blood of the Maiar had ever granted him, if that was all it was ever going to grant him, he really did not think he could be compared to his forebears. But then, Elrond had never seen much in himself worth comparing to his forebears; even his little uncles would likely have grown to overshadow him, had they been allowed to grow at all.

Ah, what a cheerful thought to come to him at a time like this.

Thankfully, Celebrimbor could guess at none of it; there were _some_ things that Elrond could keep off of his face. Celebrimbor shrugged, going from kneeling to sitting with his legs crossed beneath him, leaning back on his hands. “Oh, I don’t know. The blood of the Maiar diluted by a few generations is still the blood of something immeasurably more powerful than the Calaquendi; I don’t think it can be thought of the same way. Certainly, I think it might have served you in the town better than it did me. I didn’t think I was _ever_ going to—“

His expression changed. What could have been a smile with a few more moments of ease shriveled into something that, while it might not have been a _frown_ , still communicated nothing resembling joy. Celebrimbor’s gaze shifted, drifting towards his hands lying limp in his lap. He sucked in a deep, shuddering breath, but did not speak any more.

Well, if he was going to bring it up himself, Elrond might bring it up as well. Celebrimbor’s present state did give him pause, but Elrond had never thought that recollection of it was going to be _pleasant_. It certainly wasn’t pleasant for him.

_I won’t push too hard,_ Elrond told himself, though he had no idea how well he would hold to that resolution if Celebrimbor did not give way quickly enough for his patience, or if he let slip particularly fascinating and then refused to follow up on it. _I will not push too hard._

It was easy to promise himself such. It wasn’t so easy to deal with what would be said to him in response to the way he pushed. But then, that was the occupational hazard of the interviewer. Elrond had learned to live with it. (When the information did not involve him personally. That was key.)

“We haven’t spoken about it.” Just keep like that, something gentle, not too blunt, not too confrontational, and not in any way confrontational. He had learned the hard way how to cultivate such a manner as an interviewer, but once he had learned the lesson, he’d not needed to learn it again. And even if he hadn’t, when Elrond looked into Celebrimbor’s face, a little stretched, a little strained, a little pallid with the tautness of recollection, he thought he would have gentled his manner of asking instinctively. He could not look at such an expression on Celebrimbor’s face and be indifferent. “You’ve been so attentive to my hand, but you still haven’t told me what it was that that ghost did to you. If there is any way that I could _help_ …”

That was the thing to offer, wasn’t it? Celebrimbor had given Elrond his help, and now, Elrond should offer the same, even if the only thing he was capable of offering was a sympathetic ear and a shoulder to lean on. That he _wanted_ Celebrimbor to regard his ear as available and his shoulder ready to be leaned on should factor into it in no way, and Elrond’s greatest fear was that Celebrimbor would realize that Elrond wanted to position himself as available in such a way, and would shy away from it as the same grotesque grasping for a story that was not owed him, the same as those people who treated Elrond’s own life story as a matter of great entertainment.

Celebrimbor tilted his head to one side. He did not meet Elrond’s gaze, instead staring at a point a few inches or so below Elrond’s eyes. “Would you? You might…” His mouth spasmed. “You might find it burdensome.”

“We all bear so many burdens,” Elrond told him flatly. “Some of us more than others, but we _all_ have our burdens. I…” He clenched his teeth, before forcing his jaw loose again. “…I have not been so good about seeking others to help me bear my own burdens. I admit that. I do not think I could help you shoulder every last burden of your own, not by myself. But we both fell afoul of that ghost, and if there is any burden that it is appropriate for us to bear together, it is that one. If you wish to speak of it with me, of what happened to you when it touched you, I will listen to you.”

It was the most of a peace flag that Elrond could offer, at least as he was now. To extend a more complete flag of peace and truce would have required something he did not think he was capable of, and certainly not _here_ , in _this_ place where the ghosts, both the literal and the figurative, ruled over the castle and bent them both to their will.

But Elrond was thinking about links and about bonds again. He was thinking about those that dripped blood, and those that didn’t. He was wondering what it would be like to forge a bond that would not smear him with blood whose smell was so familiar to him that he knew it better at times than he knew himself. It wouldn’t… It wouldn’t be so bad, would it?

Celebrimbor stared into his eyes, then. The light that poured from them was unbearable, and Elrond could not look away for even a moment. Celebrimbor stared at him as if lost, and then softly, haltingly, he began to speak. “I… I only saw Lúthien once, you know.”

Elrond stiffened, but Celebrimbor did not seem to notice, or did not care. He went on, just as haltingly, just as softly:

“I saw her but once, in the court of Nargothrond. Just a glimpse, just after my father and Celegorm had…” He grimaced. “You know. I have heard many compare your look to hers since we came to Lindon. You’re…” He faltered a moment, staring down at his hands, before his gaze was once again riveted upon Elrond’s face, drinking in every patch of skin as if he had not drunk in days. He laughed, a hollow, empty, hesitant sound. “You’re much shorter than she was. She towered over everyone. She was… larger than life. Everything seemed to dim next to her. But… they’re right, you know. The resemblance is remarkable.”

Elrond wasn’t certain whether to yank Celebrimbor into his arms, or just to hit him in the face. ( _I am not_ —) Both seemed equally appealing, at the moment. At last, he settled on spluttering, face hot and voice hotter, finally managing to look away from him, “Perhaps you would want to find that water now?”

He did not look back at Celebrimbor’s face, _dared_ not look to see how his face had changed at Elrond’s response, at what could only be taken as a rejection that half of Elrond had not even wanted to give. Instead, Elrond heard Celebrimbor sigh, a sigh so voiceless that he could not even guess what sort of emotion it might carry, heard him rise to his feet, heard him start to walk away.

And Elrond just barely heard Celebrimbor mumble, as he started to look around for something he could collect water in: “The past. I saw the past.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Anor** —the Sindarin name for the Sun  
>  **Calaquendi** —“Elves of the Light”; the Elves who came to Aman from Cuiviénen, or were born there, especially those born during the Years of the Trees and had born witness to their light; the Vanyar, the Ñoldor, and the Falmari (singular: Calaquendë) (Quenya)  
>  **Edhel** —Elf (plural: Edhil) (Sindarin)  
>  **Edhil** —Elves (singular: Edhel) (Sindarin)  
>  **Elenna** —‘Starwards’ (Quenya); a name of Númenor, derived from the guidance of Eärendil given to the Edain on their initial voyage to Númenor at the beginning of the Second Age  
>  **Ennor** —Middle-Earth (Sindarin)  
>  **Falmari** —those among the Teleri who completed the journey to Aman; the name is derived from the Quenya falma, '[crested] wave.'  
>  **Iathrim** —the Sindar of Doriath  
>  **Lisgardh** —A marshy region by the Mouths of Sirion, a land of reeds that grow man-high and dense as a forest. Its name in earlier drafts was ‘Arlisgion,’ translated in The Book of Lost Tales 2 as “the place of reeds” (155).  
>  **Rodyn** —Valar (singular: Rodon) (Sindarin): a common Sindarin name for the Valar


	20. Chapter Twenty

The rest of the day was spent in less profitable diversion than Elrond would have liked. He had thought at first that Celebrimbor might just take him to the library and leave him there until it was time for supper, so that Elrond might at least have the company of the books to soothe the still dully throbbing pain in his hand. He could not take notes like this, but the pain was not so intense as to have robbed him of all literacy—the travel log he had left behind in favor of the mostly-indecipherable book of alchemy was beckoning especially enticingly—and he could have been left there to salvage something from the day, while Celebrimbor did whatever it was he intended on doing. Alas, such soon proved impossible. Elrond had had barely the strength needed to get from the kitchen to this courtyard, and when adding up a longer journey to reach the library with a long staircase in between, Elrond had been forced to concede that no, that would probably not have ended well for him. If he toppled down the stairs and struck his head, Celebrimbor really _was_ going to have to carry him down the hill after tomorrow, which was unlikely to end well for either of them.

(It was starting to nag on him, the idea of that trip back down through the bowels of the hill to the sea-cave. Celebrimbor seemed reasonably confident that Elrond would be able to make that trip unaided, so long as he took no further doses of the sedative in between now and then. Elrond, being the person who was actually going to have to make that trip in the dark, where one false step could send him hurtling down into the dark, to meet the distant and deathly embrace of cold, unyielding stone, had perhaps been thinking about it a little more than Celebrimbor.

Either he would make that trip still a little wobbly from having taken a very powerful sedative for the pain in his hand, or the sedative would have completely worn off by that time, and the pain in his hand would just…

Was it possible that the pain could dissipate entirely by the time they had to leave Tol Himling behind them? Was it possible that Elrond could leave the island completely free of the pain he had encountered there?

Somehow, Elrond did not think that to be at all likely. The sort of pain that he had first awoken to, that excruciating agony that had eaten his screams and been trying to eat his words when Celebrimbor had finally given him the sedative to drink, it did not seem like the sort of pain that would be content to relinquish its grip over the sufferer so quickly. It was the sort of pain that lingered on and on, long past the welcome it never had in the first place. Perhaps, by the time the sedative wore off and Elrond had to grope in darkness lit by one lamp only, the pain would have lessened somewhat. He could hope for that, especially considering that if the sedative wore off only for Elrond to find that the pain had lessened not a whit, _that_ was going to make it nearly as difficult to get down the hill without a fatal accident as getting down the hill while still fully in the grip of the sedative would have been. He could hope for the pain to have lessened, but he did not think it entirely prudent to hope that the pain would be _gone._ )

Celebrimbor was… Celebrimbor was not exactly speaking to Elrond at the moment, which if Elrond was going to be very honest, suited him just fine. Elrond asked Celebrimbor to retrieve his bag from the kitchen, so that there could be something he could actually _do_ while sitting out in the veranda, looking on the rainy courtyard. Celebrimbor obliged him, and then, Celebrimbor had taken some of the pots he had retrieved from the kitchen alongside Elrond’s bag, and had gone to the furthest point away from Elrond, on the other side of the courtyard, to see about collecting water and starting a fire. That suited Elrond just as well.

What he had said… Elrond could feel his face coloring at the thought of it, and wished that he could say that only one emotion formed the response.

It was not exactly _new_ to him, you know, to hear others compare his appearance to that of Lúthien’s. There were some, like Sílameril, who could make the comparison without ever opening their mouths, but making it perfectly clear that that was what they were doing, anyways. How many people had sidled up to him speaking of legacies and lineages? How many people had hoped to engender a greater interest in Elrond concerning his than they thought he possessed? It was not just those who spoke of such things in his hearing in order to influence his personal politics one way or another, either (the Sindar were more likely, here, but some of the Exiles engaged in such as well)—it was often them, but not _always_ them.

It was Celeborn, insistent on describing Region in the springtime because it thought it so sad that Elrond would never see it for himself. It was Nellas, once or twice taking the time to shyly describe to him the Onodrim she had known in Neldoreth as a girl. It was Enerdhil, before he departed for Valinor, describing the quarries in the hills surrounding Gondolin and the rich veins of ore that they had never managed to exhaust in all the time that they had lived there. It was the hazy, moth-eaten memories of a man in a faded and frayed rainbow cloak singing to him and Elros of the ineffable beauty of Valinor, of fair Tirion upon Túna and its near-twin in Gondolin in the Vale of Tumladen, upon a hill that had once been an island in a lake.

People seemed to derive special enjoyment speaking of the past to Elrond, even those who showed no sign of the same when speaking to others. And maybe… Hmm. Perhaps, if circumstances were different, he could bear it better. Elrond did not think he would ever be _indifferent,_ but if he could one day find that the pain had dwindled to something more like a blunted needle pricking the sole of his foot, then perhaps he could bear these stories, one on top of another as they all seemed to come to him as they all seemed to come to him, with something that better resembled gladness.

As for right now, right now, it was typically after the third story he had heard in as many days or less that Elrond began to seriously consider the benefits of hermitude once more. He knew he had the skills require to live the majority of his long life alone (all that would have been necessary would be to find somewhere to live whose roof was not likely to collapse, and then find a town to travel to whenever he needed new clothes), and if it meant that he did not have to listen to any more stories that seemed intent on flaying his heart open, the complete solitude of it, all chance for companionship foresworn, almost seemed worth it. After all, he could not get away with telling the storytellers to _stop_ , now could he? No, they were merely trying to rip open old scar tissue and trample a spirit already burdened by the demands of the past into the dust with their ignorant, careless feet. To be _rude_ to them for it would be an unpardonable offense!

Elrond wondered sometimes if he would ever know how to do something that wasn’t flounder. Certainly, where the past was concerned, he had not proven a very strong swimmer. But if he could, he would prefer if those around him did not try to shove him bodily under the surface of the water and then hold him there—especially if they did not even seem cognizant of what it was that they were doing.

This was not what he needed. He did not need to be regaled with story after story of just how _wonderful_ the past had been. The past had not been wonderful; Elrond’s own past had been such that there were days, many of them, when he could scarcely believe that he had survived as long as he had, except by the intervention of the Rodyn. The past had never been particularly wonderful. A beautiful city, great and good and glad, forever coexisted alongside miserable fortresses where slaves were worked without mercy or respite until they died or they became as twisted in form and in thought as their masters. There had always been kings in their shining cities who were indifferent to the suffering that went on outside their realms—Elrond’s own forefather was a prime example of such. There had always been someone starving somewhere. In the past, the greater part of the peoples of the world had always lived in fear.

What was so wonderful about such a past? What was there to be glorified? Elrond could understand it if those who made themselves over into storytellers with him as their sole audience were speaking of the good in their own pasts as a means of preserving their own happy memories, but their stories were always so divorced from the misery that stank of rotting flesh just offstage, and it was so jarring that no pleasure could be derived from them.

It was little different when Elrond conducted interviews—he had fortunately had _some_ interview subjects willing to be more candid, but many were more inclined to view the past as through a rose-tinted glass. But at least when Elrond conducted interviews, he had some measure of _control_. _He_ dictated what questions would be asked, what topics the interview would cover. Though he had to be careful to avoid steering the subjects _too_ much, he could at least tell them when they were getting off-topic and direct them to either get back _on_ topic, or consider the interview concluded. And that was another thing, wasn’t it? If Elrond felt he needed to, he could cut the interview short and vacate himself from the presence of his subject without bringing more than a slight risk to himself—none, if he could conjure for himself a plausible enough excuse of why it was that he was leaving that had nothing to do with the fact that if he had to listen to that person talk with such nostalgic bliss about the flawless beauty of wherever for just a minute more, there was a good chance that he was going to do something to them that he would have regretted, once the guards came for him.

At least he had some measure of control when he conducted interviews. Outside of that setting, he had no control at all.

And Celebrimbor was…

Celebrimbor was complicated. He always had been.

From the very start, he had been complicated, and Elrond was at no loss for words as to why. They were bound; even before they met, there were ties that bound them. Of course, they were distantly related by blood, Celebrimbor’s grandfather and Elrond’s great-great-grandfather on his father’s side being brothers. They were related by blood, but that was not what bound them, and that was not what made the ties that bound them so very, very soaked in blood.

They were bound, because the only two surviving brothers of Celebrimbor’s father had put a refugee camp in the Lisgardh to the sword, and taken away from that camp the two small sons of their escaped quarry. They were bound, because the two surviving brothers of Celebrimbor’s father had seized Elrond and Elros and then chosen to raise them as close to their own children as they could manage, rather than treating them simply as highborn hostages.

(They were still that, Elrond thought, or, so he thought from time to time, when he lied awake in the dark of the night and the wind blew outside his window in just the way it would blow outside the windows of Amon Ereb. They might have raised them as children, but they had still been highborn hostages. If any messages had ever come from Gil-galad or whatever representative the Iathrim put forth or Finarfin or Ingil of the Vanyar or Eönwë himself, demanding that Maglor and Maedhros return Elrond and Elros to their own people, Elrond could guess just how well Maglor would have responded to that. Maedhros might have made the argument that pragmatism demanded that they return Elrond and Elros to those who were demanding their return, lest they bring down the wrath of the whole host upon them. Maedhros might even, on one of his better days, have argued that what morality they could yet lay claim to demanded that they return Elrond and Elros to whomever demanded they be returned, if they had even the slightest claim to the custody of these two twin princes of the Sindar. But Maglor, _Maglor_ , oh, Elrond _did_ know just how Maglor would have responded.

After a certain point, Elrond would not have consented to be parted from Maglor. It had been easy for him to replace a father whose face Elrond could not recall, no matter how hard he tried; it had been nearly as easy for him to replace a mother who was so badly eaten by the time she returned to her sons at the end of her duties each day, that she had little to nothing left inside of her to give to her sons. There had been love between them, him and Elros and Maglor. There had been love between them, and you would not expect a parent to give up their children, but still, what did you call it when someone who had become a parent to children the way that Maglor had become father to Elrond and Elros refused to give those children back to those who had a much greater, much more legitimate claim on them? There was only one thing, and that thing was what kept Elrond from sleeping on those dark nights when the wind blew outside of his window as it had blown outside the windows of Amon Ereb.)

Elrond had been bound to Celebrimbor since before they had met. They had been bound, both by their distant blood relations and by the violence that Celebrimbor’s eldest two uncles had done to the home of Elrond’s birth, by the kidnapping of Elrond and his brother that had turned only later into something resembling a proper fosterage. They were bound, and Elrond did not think that there was any blade in the world sharp enough to sever those bindings; they would persist for as long as they both lived, and even after one of them was dead, if one of them did indeed die, Elrond suspected that the bond would just persist, frayed and broken at one end, bleeding sluggishly as the bearer dragged it behind him. (He wondered if it would be him. Elrond bore his bloodied and broken bonds, and Celebrimbor must bear his as well. Either of them could bear those bloodied and broken bonds equally well, Elrond thought, but Elrond also thought that he might be better-shaped for it. Celebrimbor had been born after the waning of the bliss of Valinor, but he had still been born in a land thought to be utterly beyond death and grief—the example of Míriel Þerindë having been forgotten, it seemed—and Elrond had been born as the eldest son of an orphaned queen in a refugee camp that constantly feared complete and total annihilation. If either of them had been shaped for death and grief and the carrying of it without being completely and totally crushed by it, it was Elrond.)

They were bound, and that made Celebrimbor complicated. Celebrimbor was complicated, and in response to that, Elrond had…

He hated the stories, after a certain point. He disliked the stories told to him with the intent of swaying his own mind and opinions, and hated, hated, _hated_ the stories that were told to him with no such intent, that were told to him without any ulterior motive that meant to sway Elrond towards favoring the Sindar or the Exiles or, on some _exceedingly_ rare occasions, the Laegrim. He hated the way they burrowed beneath his skin and stung in his mouth and sat at motes in his eyes, coaxing out moisture every drop of which he begrudged utterly. Elrond hated those stories more than any other stories he had ever heard. There was something about hearing about it from someone’s lips, instead of from the comforting, comfortingly _silent_ pages of books, that made Elrond feel as if he was being slowly flayed alive. (And without the potential bloodily wet comfort of at least being _seen_ in the process.)

He by different turns disliked and hated the stories he was subjected to, when he had no ready means of separating himself from the storyteller. Elrond could not remember a time when he had ever _dreaded_ the prospect of being subjected to another such story, except when he thought that Celebrimbor was trying to catch his eye in Lindon, except when he heard Celebrimbor calling his name when Elrond was just about to step through a doorway out of the room, _always_ when Elrond was close enough to leaving the room that he could just slip through the doorway and plausibly pretend that he’d not heard Celebrimbor calling after him, Elrond made sure of that. But yes, Elrond dreaded the idea of listening to the tales when it was Celebrimbor telling them. At least when it was the others, the tales were all but guaranteed to be of figures who, though they were connected to Elrond by ties of kinship and blood, were still strangers or near-strangers to him. It made him feel like he was bleeding to hear tales of his parents, but at least they were not people whom he _knew_. With Celebrimbor, there was every chance, even the likelihood, that eventually the tales would roll around to people whom Elrond had known.

He couldn’t have reconciled the two disparate images. Elrond had known that then, and he had been reacquainted to it here in Himring, every new find even more at odds with the Maedhros Elrond had known. Elrond knew that he could not have reconciled the images Celebrimbor painted for him with the people Elrond had _known_. Everyone liked to veer into the past to tell their tales; why should Celebrimbor be any different? Everyone liked to paint a rosy picture of a past that Elrond couldn’t really believe had ever existed in the form that they were trying to convince him it had existed; why should Celebrimbor be any different?

Elrond knew that he could not have reconciled the images, and that the failure to reconcile them could have… He did not know what the failure could have done. He was not certain that he wanted to find out.

Celebrimbor was complicated in Lindon, for reasons that had been as clear to Elrond as the fabled waters of Eithel Ivrin. Celebrimbor was complicated in Himring, for a whole new host of reasons that Elrond could no longer pretend were opaque to him, could no longer pretend bore more resemblance to Ivrin after Glaurung grew jealous of its beauty, or became desperate for a drink, or whatever had been happening there, and took it into his draconic head to defile the waters. That the manner of his complications had taken on new dimensions during this trip did not make them any easier for Elrond to contend with. They only made them all the more disquieting to contemplate.

What it would be like, to be truly _seen_? Elrond had had that once, with his brother. He and Elros had been through so much together, had watched every last wretched and vile thing that had been theirs to witness during their child right alongside each other. Every paltry meal, every night spent in hunger or fear of the weather or what was lurking in the dark out of sight of their campfires, every brutal training session with their first swords, every battle, every loss, they had shared it all. Once upon a time, there could be no two hearts that were closer than theirs. They had had no secrets from each other.

But such could be no longer. They were different now, so different, and though Elrond and Elros had seen each other once, what they had of each other were images that had hardened and crystallized at that moment, just out of their childhoods, when they had been summoned to stand before Eönwë and _choose_.

(Oddly, there had been no moment in his life that Elrond thought more upsetting than that one. Oh, do not mistake him: Elrond did not think it odd that the event itself had been upsetting. It was just that the thing about it all that had upset him the most was not what someone he told the story to would have expected. On reflection, it was not what _Elrond_ would have expected.

They had been called before this strange, bird-like man in the largest of the tents in the Vanyar’s encampment—Elrond suspected that Prince Ingil’s tent had been commandeered for the occasion—a man whom Elrond could not look at overlong before his eyes started to search for features that were not there and he started to wonder why he ever thought of this being as a man at all when it was clear that he was something _other_. Eönwë had looked at each of them in turn with the intensely yellow eyes of an eagle and, without giving them any chance to think it over or speak amongst themselves or even just sit down and stare at him in shock over the weight of what he was asking of them, he called upon them to choose.

It would be fair to say that it had been… _upsetting_ , that Elros had chosen differently. It would be fair, if an understatement, and Elrond counted the fact that he’d not started screaming in the moment the greatest test of his restraint that had ever been put to him, so not a _small_ understatement. But that was not the most upsetting thing about it, if you can believe that. Elrond had a feeling that the moment of his brother’s choice would come to eclipse the truly most upsetting moment of the affair in time, but while he could still remember the day clearly—not that he thought it possible to ever truly forget—this was what struck him hardest:

The idea that it could be so perfunctory, so quick. Elrond was not certain what it was, but the idea that he could just choose in a moment whether or not old age would find him and he would inevitably die, the idea that he could just _choose_ , in a split-second, an uninformed second, an impulsive second, the destination of his spirit if death was to find him, could choose in an impulsive second whether or not he chose to stay in the world with everything he had ever known or go out beyond the circles into the utter unknown beyond the stars, with no guarantee that there was _anything_ waiting for him at all in that beyond, made him feel very, very, disgustingly, _terrifyingly_ small. And insignificant. And light-headed. And honestly, Elrond thought he understood Andreth better than Finrod ever had. But mostly, the idea of it made Elrond feel about as important in the grand scheme of things as the beetle he had accidentally stepped on on the way to the tent where he was now sweating.)

There was no one now who could truly _see_ Elrond. Elros saw only the crystallized image of Elrond as he had been, just before they had stepped into that tent at each other’s sides. Gil-galad _tried_ , Elrond knew that, and he could not help but be grateful for it, even though the gratitude sometimes threatened to crawl out of his throat as a scream, but though there were some commonalities between them, the points where they diverged were so numerous and so drastic that really, Elrond was not sure how much of him that Gil-galad could see at all—more like a whisper, like a suggestion of him, than the actual person.

The others, they all saw the image they expected to see, and where their disparate perceptions converged was on the point of legacy, though that legacy might mean different things to each of them in turn. They looked at Elrond and they saw the shadow of Elwing, or the shadow of Eärendil, or they looked at him and considered his brother and looked for Eluréd and Elurín shying away from their piercing stares in the shelter of Elrond’s shadow. Dior and Lúthien and Thingol and sometimes even _Melian_ , though Elrond had no idea how he was supposed to live up to _her_ , and he suspected they didn’t, either. Or we could go the other way back from Eärendil and start searching for signs of Idril or Tuor, of Turgon or Fingolfin. Many people looked at Elrond and saw a ghost. Many more people looked at Elrond and tried to paint a ghost over his features.

Perhaps Celebrimbor would do that as well, if Elrond ever allowed him the chance to try. Perhaps instead of the usual assortment of direct-line or nearly direct-line ancestors, Celebrimbor would instead be looking for some germ of Maglor or Maedhros in Elrond’s manner, in his table manners or his handwriting or the exact way in which he raised his voice when he became upset. Perhaps he would do that, and Elrond would finally find all bases covered in terms of those whom people looked for when they looked into his face. Or maybe, just maybe, Celebrimbor would look into Elrond’s face, and Elrond would realize with a start that the only person Celebrimbor was looking for there was Elrond himself.

For Celebrimbor had problems with this as well, did he not? Elrond would have had to be not blind, deaf, and dumb, for he suspected that someone who fit all three of those categories could still have figured it out eventually, but willfully ignorant, not to notice the problems Celebrimbor had with this. There were even some days, days when Elrond had not been subjected to the stories in a while and the sting of them had started to fade out of his skin, when he would even feel charitable enough to admit that really, Celebrimbor had it rather worse than him. At least Elrond’s family lines were part of a past that people wanted to _remember_. Most everyone would have much sooner forgotten that the House of Fëanor had ever existed, and that Celebrimbor was here to serve as a living reminder of them was counted by most to be… _inconvenient_.

As it was, Celebrimbor had been pushed to the margins of the royal court, and Elrond did not know if he stayed because of the friendship of those such as Gil-galad (the High King’s friendship no doubt counted for a great deal, even if it could not silence the whispers or soothe the animosity) and Galadriel and Celeborn, or if Celebrimbor was simply drawing on a deep reserve of stubbornness to keep him exactly where he wanted to stay, even if relatively few who shared that space with him actually wanted him there. Celebrimbor had been pushed to the margins of the royal court, regarded with wariness by nearly all of the Sindarin courtiers and with wariness by a good number of the Exilic courtiers as well, when given his upbringing, he could likely have played a _much_ greater role in the governance of Lindon and served Lindon quite well in such a capacity. Celebrimbor might be unassuming, but he had still been a _prince_ , and a prince likely raised as the heir of his father and uncle in Himlad if something was to befall them. Who knew what advice he might have, what measures he could carry out, what improvements he could make, if he was ever allowed to _try_?

But such was not to be. Celebrimbor stuck to the forges, and though he had produced many fine works of craftsmanship over the years, and Elrond knew him to have been involved in the making of rather less glorious things like nails and horseshoes and pots and pans for those in the city who needed them, Celebrimbor never traversed the halls of power except as a guest. Even Elrond carried more influence there than him, and nearly everyone there couldn’t get past the reputation he held as the kidnapped child raised by the enemy they wished to forget, couldn’t get past the shadows of the dead, to see the person he was trying to become.

No, on days when Elrond was not feeling particularly keenly his own burdens, he would not pretend that he thought that Celebrimbor had it better than him. For all that Celebrimbor had repudiated his family in Nargothrond, his feelings towards them must be more complicated than simple disgust and shame. If Celebrimbor had not been pushed so sorely, Elrond wondered if, even now, he might freely, even gladly, identify himself as Curufin’s son. Of course, if Celebrimbor was willing to repudiate his house over what Curufin and Celegorm had done in Nargothrond, no doubt he would have been willing to repudiate them over the Second and Third Kinslayings (Elrond could not imagine him going along with it, even if the alternative was striking out on his own into the desolate, Orc-infested wilderness), but imagine if those events had not come to pass. We do not give up our kin easily, even if there is not ease between us. There are bonds which, even when all love has gone out of them, still are not severed so easily.

It was not… Elrond would admit it. It was not fair to ask someone to disavow their own family, just to have some guarantee of safety, a guarantee that, in Celebrimbor’s case, had ultimately amounted to nothing on Balar. Elrond was not as well-acquainted with Círdan as he could have been, but based on the acquaintance he did have, he could guess how Círdan would have responded to the stabbing, and he could guess equally well that after a while, the presence of guards would have felt to Celebrimbor more like punishment than protection.

It wasn’t fair, to have to give up family in exchange for shelter. It was not fair to ask someone to think of the person who had raised them and loved them and tell them to think of them no more, but to think of them as monsters. It was not fair to poison every kindness done, every lesson taught, every night spent soothing a child frightened by the tremendous storms raging outside the castle walls. It was not fair to declare all of that void, because of the actions of the caretaker.

Elrond must, in this Second Age of Anor, keep his mouth shut, no matter how much blood and black bile built up behind it. So too was Celebrimbor obliged to keep his mouth firmly shut. This was an Age for recovering from all that had gone so horribly wrong in the last. We must put to bed those things that went so badly awry. We must put them to bed, and speak of them no more. If the reminder comes in a form that cannot be banished by our silence, he must still be looked upon askance, and pushed to the margins where we can at least look at him as little as possible.

If… If there was anyone whom Elrond thought could look at him and _see_ him, it was Celebrimbor. The prospect set off a longing unlike any that Elrond had ever known, a longing so deep and so vast and so all-consuming that, in some moments, it was difficult to separate the desire to be seen from himself in his whole, difficult to mark clearly where the desire ended and he began. But that desire had always gone muzzled and silenced, for stronger still was the terror that beat at its back as it ran.

Elrond had spoken of flaying. Elrond had spoken of bleeding. Elrond had spoken of ghoulish spectacle. He did not fear to die from it, you know. No, Elrond thought that suffering all of that, only to die immediately after it was over would have been, while unpleasant and grotesque and infuriating, relatively easy. To be seen against his will, by those who were not meant to see him at all, and then to die so that he would not have to deal with the aftermath of it, that sounded like a relief.

The aftermath was what he feared, feared with so much of himself that fear of it prevailed in overpowering fear of the mutilation itself. To be seen against his will, and then die, that would have been easy. To be seen against his will, by people who were not really seeing him at all, only thought they were, were seeing only what they expected to see, and then to have to live with their reactions, live with the way their perspective and their treatment of him changed, that did not feel like being flayed so much as it felt like being torn apart.

What had happened to him throughout his life, the way it had shaped him, these things were too private to ever really share with someone who did not know Elrond’s heart during that time as well as he did himself. What continued to happen to him after childhood was so forcefully called to an end, that was so private as to be woven in with his heartstrings, a language that he doubted any but himself would ever be able to decipher.

He could only _recount_ a tale that would have been incomplete and imperfect, and would still have been totally indecipherable to all but a very select few. Elrond did not know if Celebrimbor would be able to understand the whole of what he presented to him, but you did not have to understand every last trailing facet to _see_ , did you? To _see_ , you need eyes and a mind that can comprehend the heart, and not be repelled by it. That was what Elrond needed, above all else: for the heart to be seen, and not considered repulsive.

That was what he wanted. It was what he feared, for the chink in his certainty still lived and breathed and whispered to him: but _what if, what if, what if_ …

What if he could not communicate himself well enough to make it all clear?

What if he faltered and fell silent halfway through, and could not communicate the whole story?

What if he _did_ manage to get it all out, did manage to make his own heart as clear and as open as he could manage, but he found that he had misjudged Celebrimbor, and he had exposed himself to a true emotional flaying, exposed himself to the true grotesque spectacle, instead of something that might have felt like it for a moment, but would have eventually come to so much happier a conclusion?

If that conclusion was to be happy, anyways.

Sometimes, Elrond was certain it would end well. Sometimes, he was certain it would end just as poorly as the most ghoulishly curious of those who tried to worm his life’s story out of him in Lindon for their own idle amusement. Sometimes, Elrond thought he had judged Celebrimbor well. Sometimes, he thought that he did not know the man at all, and that his ignorance would serve him ill. Sometimes, Elrond thought that it would all go exactly as he had thought it would, that he would be seen and seen truly, and not rejected afterwards, and that it would not make him feel any different, that it would not give him any relief, that it would not give him any _happiness_.

He could not control how Celebrimbor would respond to it, even if he was to look at the bloody, vulnerable heart put into his hands, with all of its facets and its flaws, every moment of resentment and anger and black despair putting diseased veins into what once was healthy flesh, and not find it repulsive. The past was hard. The future was harder. The present sometimes felt fit to crush him to death. The same thing that made Elrond think that if anyone could see him, Celebrimbor could, was something that he feared to have wielded against him as a knife, even if the person wielding it did not seem to understand that they could cut and stab and kill with it.

He… Oh, he was half-hearted, but he dreaded to speak of it. Elrond was already shackled with the assumptions people made regarding the time he and Elros had spent with Maglor and Maedhros. He was already burdened with the reputation of the kidnapped child, he was already weighed down with the careless sympathy from many and the grating wariness from some and the exclamations of _all_ , coarse enough to break his skin, _Oh, how_ awful _that must have been!_

Celebrimbor knew Maglor and Maedhros better than anyone currently living in Lindon, though if you were to narrow things down to the last few decades of Maedhros’s life, if you were to narrow things down to the last few decades in which Maglor was known to anyone currently living, at all, Elrond thought that his knowledge might be superior. If anyone might be able to come to Elrond with a perspective that did not involve _Oh, how_ awful _that must have been_!, it was Celebrimbor. If anyone might be able to adopt a different perspective, it was someone who had known them and loved them as well. But when Elrond thought about what _else_ Celebrimbor could reveal, he was ruled suddenly by a sick fascination, a crawling dread.

He knew that Maglor and Maedhros as he had known them as a child were not, _could_ not be as they had been for the entirety of their lives, or even more than a small portion of their lives. The way they had been when Elrond and Elros had been in their care, men did not get that way without grappling for years upon years with the most abject despair. You did not get that badly eaten without grappling with things utterly beyond your ability to contain them. You did not teeter so close to being totally consumed by the oaths you had sworn unless those oaths called directly from the Void itself. You did not, and not, and not, and there had been a time before they were so badly eaten, before they teetered so close to being totally consumed, and Celebrimbor knew those times in a way that Elrond never could, for while it was easier to read of the past than it was to hear of it out of biased mouths, Elrond knew that for such figures as Maglor and Maedhros, the histories would never give a complete story, for he knew exactly how the historians would choose to skew things: they were always destined to evil, they were evil at heart from the beginning and this inclined them towards evil deeds, and loyalty to their father and overconfidence and dread of a fearsome Oath had _nothing_ to do with it.

Celebrimbor would not slant his stories in such a fashion, not about his own family, surely. Even if hard words had been bandied between him and his father before Curufin and Celegorm quit Nargothrond forever, Elrond could not imagine that Celebrimbor would make out own family to have been remorseless, reprehensible villains for all of their lives, even at the height of the bliss and beauty of Valinor. Elrond did not have to worry that if he allowed Celebrimbor to tell him all that he knew, as Celebrimbor had clearly _wished_ to for as long as they had known each other, he would make his father and his uncles and his grandfather out to all be slavering monsters from the very start, utterly incapable of any true good.

But it wasn’t as if that was _all_ there was to fear, was it?

Elrond knew what it was he wanted, even when he denied it to himself, even when he would not acknowledge it, even when he _could not_ acknowledge it. What he wanted was to not have to deal with the idea that Celebrimbor could weave for him an image (and the great-grandson of Míriel Þerindë was doubtless an apt weaver when he chose to be, whether his medium was cloth or was words) of Maglor and Maedhros that was both accurate, and obliterated the image that Elrond had of them. What he wanted was to not have to contend with Maedhros and Maglor being made strangers to him, the images Celebrimbor wove for him becoming so vivid in his mind that his memories of every word they had ever said to him, every look they had ever directed his way, every touch they had ever had for him, became as dull and as blunted as if they were something Elrond had experienced secondhand, as if they were memories belonging to another that had been related to him by a not particularly expert storyteller. What Elrond wanted was to preserve the memories that he had, bittersweet as they might have been—and more bitter than sweet, many days—against any assaults by other realities that could have weakened their foundations.

What Elrond wanted from _Celebrimbor_ was…

Hmm.

Elrond chewed on the inside of his cheek, worrying at the wet flesh with his teeth. The fluttering feeling had returned to his stomach, as if he had swallowed an entire swarm of butterflies, and this time, a flock of starlings for good measure.

He always knew what it was he wanted. Even when he wasn’t willing to admit it.

And… And…

And it would not be the _first_ time someone had compared him to Lúthien. He’d heard it often, from many different people, that the resemblance he bore Lúthien was so remarkable and so total that it drowned out any resemblance he might otherwise have borne his other kin. No one ever remarked that he looked like Elwing or Eärendil, Dior or Nimloth, Turgon or Elenwë and Beren. If someone was to tell him who it was in his family line that he resembled, it always came back to Lúthien, the way a stream could be reliably traced back to the river it sprang from, the way a river could be traced back to the spring it sprang from.

Sometimes, those people drew attention to the resemblance out of the same nostalgia that saw them telling tale after tale of the glory of Menegroth and the surrounding forests. Elrond got that, got it often, wished he got it more often than he did. The others…

He’d not quite understood why the woman was saying it to him, the first time he’d encountered the _other_ reason people might compare his appearance to Lúthien’s. Elrond knew that by the standards of all, he was extremely young, knew that, were his growth equal to that of an Edhel with no Mannish blood in their veins, he would be counted a child yet. But he had been _very_ young when this particular incident had taken place, just a few years out from having come to Lindon in the first place, and the biggest mercy of the whole thing was that at the time, the import of the comment had flown high above his head, and the woman had, for whatever reason, be it belief that he had been consciously rejecting her or belief that the fact that the meaning of her observation having flown over his head meant that she should back away, not approached him again afterwards. There was very little mercy to be taken out of the situation otherwise, and Elrond did not care to recall it in any great detail.

Lúthien was widely considered to have been quite attractive. _Obviously_ , Elrond meant, since she was almost universally acclaimed as the most beautiful woman who ever lived, and very few of those who had never laid eyes on Elbereth were willing to concede that Elbereth could possibly have been fairer to look on. Lúthien was almost universally considered to have been _extremely_ attractive, and if you were to believe everyone who had told Elrond so, he looked so like her that if you saw him from just a short distance, he could easily have been believed to be Lúthien herself, until he was caught in a light that showcased the more masculine among his features—though there had been some who had assured him that even there, there was little difference between his features and Lúthien’s.

Lúthien was almost universally considered to have been extremely attractive, and more than once, there had been those who had remarked on such to Elrond, in such a way as to give the impression that they were not speaking out of a need to indulge in their own nostalgia.

Elrond had thought he already knew what the signals that Celebrimbor were giving off to him meant. He’d expected proof eventually, one way or another. He’d not expected it like that.

He… he really did not know what to do with it.

He knew what he would _like_ to do with it, but he also knew the emotions inspired by having someone attempt to express interest in him in _this_ particular way, and Elrond really didn’t…

He bit back a sigh, absurdly afraid that if he let his sigh escape through his mouth, Celebrimbor would not only hear it, but immediately guess that Elrond had been thinking about him. Well, perhaps Celebrimbor would go one step further than that and sense that Elrond was thinking about just how _complicated_ he was. Perhaps Celebrimbor would do him the kindness of expressing his interest a little more frankly, and removing the complication from their affairs.

But no, Celebrimbor was not going to do that. Celebrimbor had read exactly what Elrond had intended for him to read in the deflection, the reminder that water was needed. Celebrimbor was not really speaking to him at the moment; Celebrimbor had gone out of his way to avoid _looking_ at Elrond since he had started going about his business. For as long as Elrond had needed to think, that had suited him just fine. For as long as he had needed the space to think, it had suited him well that Celebrimbor was giving him that space.

And it wasn’t as if Elrond wasn’t _still_ thinking. It wasn’t as if he did not still need the space to think. But he always felt that way. He never felt ready when he felt as if he was on the precipice of exposure. He never felt ready when he felt as if he was on the verge of entering into something new. Elrond suspected that, ridiculous as it was, he’d feel unready and apprehensive when the time came for him to give his completed report to Gil-galad, even though that was going to open up so many more opportunities to him than he would have otherwise received. It would make his life feel so much less static, so much less confined, if he was allowed to travel as an independent adult would have been allowed. But it would also make his life _different_.

To reach for what it was he wanted, when it would make his life so different? When it was still far off, it seemed so simple. The closer Elrond came to the actual event, the more the prospect of reaching for what he wanted felt like telling himself that if he put his hands into a fire, he would not be burned. He wondered if reaching for what he wanted every felt similarly to Celebrimbor. Being a smith, he _would_ have a much better idea than Elrond of what thrusting his hands into a fire might actually feel like. Perhaps that gave him more caution in such affairs. Perhaps that was enough to convince him that he ought not to reach out, not unless he was _sure_ of what the result would be.

And Elrond had given him reason to doubt.

Elrond _did_ sigh this time, without caring much if Celebrimbor heard him from all the way on the other side of the courtyard. He ought to find a way to sort all of this out, but honestly, the setback felt safer than pressing forward would have. Stagnancy felt safer.

_It’s not_ better _, though, is it?_

But finding his memories of his own childhood caretakers rendered dust in the face of all of the things Celebrimbor could have told him was not _better_. Finding that he had misjudged the man and the bloody heart he held out was deemed repulsive would not have been _better_. Being seen only for the act of seeing to turn into a grotesque spectacle would not have been _better_. Reaching out for what he wanted only to find that his hands really were burned would not be—

Elrond sucked in a deep breath, forced himself to let it out evenly. He turned his attention to the faded and defaced and largely indecipherable book of alchemy that he had found in the library the day before, told himself not to stare at Celebrimbor any longer. He was here for a _purpose_ , and even if his body was presently too weak to pursue that purpose as fully as he should have, he ought to pursue the purpose as well as he could. This was a distraction. It was a distraction, and it was one that Elrond was not certain would not hurt him.

(He had to remind himself, again and again and again, that it could hurt him.)

If this thing with Celebrimbor was something to be pursued, it was something that could wait until after they had left Tol Himling behind them. That would buy Elrond some time. What exactly he was going to _do_ with that time that he had not done already—he knew what it was that he had wanted, he had spelled out the reasons for himself why he had not already gone after it, and he could feel the nagging at him, the wondering why he should not go after it anyways—Elrond did not know, but he had the vague, slightly giddy sense that it would buy him some time.

Instead, he ought to set his mind to trying to make heads or tails of this book, in even the slightest sense. If he could make sense of it in even the most tangential way, Elrond thought that that would be a discovery on par with the revelation of the state of the library itself.

Actually, he was not terribly optimistic about what he was going to glean from this book. But it was absorbing—frustrating, if he was very honest with himself—enough that he thought it could keep him from thinking about Celebrimbor, if only for a little while.

…A very little while, as it turned out. But every time Elrond’s attention strayed, he focused it back on the book, and let the steady pattering of the rain against the ground fill in the rest of his attention. It was all that he could do.

-0-0-0-

The latter part of the day was quiet. It was not a comfortable quiet, even though Elrond had always found a rainstorm that was not accompanied by thunder or lightning or excessive wind to be somewhat soothing. Oddly pungent, almost salty smoke drifted in what few wisps were not extinguished by the rain to the spot under the veranda where Elrond was sitting; when he dared to look up from his book, he was greeted by the sight of puffs of gray-black smoke almost completely obscuring the fire Celebrimbor had set and Celebrimbor himself.

Not entirely obscuring.

Their eyes met briefly, and Elrond had to look away, his face warming once more.

No, it was not a comfortable quiet at all.

Celebrimbor spent the first few hours of the rainy afternoon boiling water, as he had said that he would. He poured the results, once the water had had the chance to cool, into the waterskins he had emptied while he was on the island, and then the excess went to a clean pot that Elrond could only assume had come from his pack. That being accomplished, his silence did not lift. He did not catch Elrond’s eye, smile a smile that would have returned the light to his mouth, and communicate in such a way that all was well. Instead, Celebrimbor disappeared through a door into the castle itself.

Well, Elrond could be reasonably certain that he was not being abandoned here. After all, Celebrimbor might be a strong man, stronger than him, but even he would struggle still to get that boat down the exposed, wind-swept and water-soaked staircase without someone holding up the back of the boat behind him. That, and Elrond did not feel like getting up and pursuing him. There was a part of him that would have _liked_ to do that, a part of him that longed to force the confrontation right now, in this place, just to have it over with. But that was not how he typically operated, and he knew it. ‘Getting it over with’ was not something he had ever regarded as a particularly sensible, let alone _safe_ strategy. Where the thought had come from, Elrond did not know, though he suspected it might arise from the same place that had impelled Beren to look Thingol dead in the eye and tell him that even _now_ , his hand grasped the Silmaril Thingol had been so desperate for.

Getting up and following Celebrimbor around like a puppy felt oddly pathetic, something Elrond had not been capable of indulging in since early childhood. A child could do something like that, and he was not a child any longer. Eönwë had called him and Elros into his tent on what was left of the field, and Eönwë had returned to Valinor with what was left of Elrond’s childhood grasped in his cruel-keen talons.

And besides, Elrond felt better sitting down, that was true, but he had not journeyed so far outside awareness of himself to have forgotten that once he stood up, it would be clutching at the walls to be sure that he wouldn’t topple over onto unforgiving floors—or disgusting, lethal, mold-riddled rugs, if Elrond found himself following after Celebrimbor into the entrance hall. No, Elrond would do what was best for him. He would do what was safest. He would sit here, and wait, and try to decode something of the book he had taken from the library, if there was anything a complete novice in the art of alchemy was capable of decoding at all—which wasn’t very likely, true, but _maybe_ …

Celebrimbor came and went from the courtyard. His hands were always empty when he left the courtyard, and his hands were always empty when he returned to the courtyard. Elrond could never make out his face when he was leaving, could never make out his face when he was returning. His back was turned to Elrond, or else the hair he had chosen to leave loose today shielded his face from view, or else an especially thick cloud passed over Anor’s face and plunged the courtyard into such shadow that Elrond was incapable of making out _Celebrimbor’s_ face. And sometimes, Elrond would have to admit that he’d just not been trying that hard to make out Celebrimbor’s expression. Sometimes, he had not been at all eager to see what expression that Celebrimbor might wear.

Elrond could not guess what it was that Celebrimbor was doing when he was out of the courtyard, for with no material proof of where he was going and what he was doing there, and no way for Elrond to ask him without the words grating so hard against the roof of his mouth as to draw blood. There were some possibilities, he supposed. It was _possible_ that Celebrimbor was even simply trying to drink in the sights of a place that had once been, if not his home, then something very much like it. Perhaps he had missed Himring. Perhaps he did not look forward to missing Himring again.

But somehow, Elrond did not think that that was the case. Celebrimbor had not seemed happy to be here, not even once. Whatever it was he was doing out of Elrond’s sight, Elrond rather doubted it was indulging in nostalgia.

Eventually, the fruitless and frustrating day went down into night, and they made their way back down into the kitchens to sleep. By that time, Elrond was able to stand a little more easily, was able to walk without needing to lean so heavily on Celebrimbor for support, though…

He would never admit this aloud, it was so ridiculous. It was ridiculous, and frankly, it was so inappropriate that Elrond thought it at least mildly unworthy of him and the position he held in the royal court. (Anyone who heard him express such a belief would have laughed gently—or pityingly—and told him stories that made his own sound so tame and so innocent as to be believable only as something that had happened between small children, stories to make his straight hair curl. It would not have been enough to banish from Elrond that feeling of frustrated, shamefaced _this is so childish, this is rankly inappropriate, this is unworthy of me, even if I do not know what_ would _be worthy of me, I know that this is not it—_ )

Elrond… might have been less than honest about the amount of support he still needed while he was walking. Celebrimbor had not made any comment about it as they made their slow, laborious way back down into the kitchens, which Elrond honestly could not mark out as either an encouraging or a discouraging sign. He had been slightly giddy the whole time, and had not stopped to think too much about what Celebrimbor might be thinking of Elrond having to cling to him the whole time they made the descent. But it was too late to take it back now. Elrond wasn’t certain whether he even _wanted_ to take it back.

The day had sunk down. Night had come. As little as Elrond was looking forward to it, it was time to sleep.

-0-0-0-

At least the fact Elrond’s dreams when sleeping on earth were such as they were meant that the likelihood of _erotic_ dreams was so low as to be nearly non-existent. Actually…

Actually, what _would_ that be like, combining the erotic with the utterly bizarre? Lying awake in the dark, with nothing better to do than try to keep his mind too wakeful to succumb to sleep—Elrond had had more than enough of trying to make sense of that little battered tome for one day, and had secreted it back down into his bag—Elrond indulged in something he rarely indulged in, rarely felt the need or even the want to indulge in. The erotic was… It was something Elrond was most comfortable with when he encountered it in a book. Perhaps that would change for him in time; at the very least, he did not think that his disinclination was something that had come upon him entirely naturally. Perhaps it was a matter merely of his youth. Perhaps it was a matter of all that still needed to be done in order to make Lindon and the surrounding lands in Eriador truly a kingdom of the Edhil. Perhaps it was bound up in every last thing that had made the personal so fraught. Elrond did not know. He knew only that when he thought of his own disinclinations, he could not convince himself that it was something that had originated within. It did not feel permanent.

Trying to think about it now, trying consciously to combine the erotic with the bizarre, it was… it was difficult. It was like trying to shove his body through an opening in the wall that was just an inch or so too small to get his shoulders through—it _seemed_ , when Elrond had first inspected the opening, that it was something that would be within his power to accomplish, but when he actually set about the task, it just wasn’t possible.

Elrond gave up on it after a few unsatisfied minutes. He was able to form no concrete images, except for holding the thought of mirrors in his mind, mirrors that showed him and Celebrimbor not what reality would show them, but instead what the subconscious expected to see.

Yes, they must both have the same problem with mirrors, mustn’t they? Celebrimbor must have the same problem with faces, the faces people expected to see when they looked at him, and the face that actually belonged to him. In any dreams involving both of them, mirrors must feature somehow. Elrond just wasn’t sure _how_ , or _when_. And yes, it was the dissatisfaction with his own lack of imagination that caused Elrond to put the speculation to bed. The fear that Celebrimbor would eventually realize what he was doing had absolutely _nothing_ to do with it.

The actual dream, when it came to him, was… Well, Elrond was not certain how time worked in his dreams, as opposed to the concrete waking world, but at least this dream was relatively short.

At least it was short. That was what he would be telling himself for some time to come.

Elrond was on the cliff once more, watching the Sea rush up its banks to swallow up the shores and the vales and the green hills and the forests. There was no Elros this time, no Maglor and no Maedhros. There was only him, watching as everything he had known was devoured by dark and hungry water.

It all went as it had once before, until suddenly it wasn’t going that way at all. Elrond watched the dark waves swallow up Beleriand, and then, Beleriand began to rise back up over the Sea.

There was no receding of the waters. The Sea was not giving way to the land, the Sea was not showing a mercy that Elrond had never known it to exhibit before, the Sea was not showing the sort of weakness that Elrond would never have thought it willing to show to those who could so easily become its next victims. The Sea was, as it ever was, something utterly beyond Elrond’s ability to influence or even understand. He could not speak to its motives, could not speak to its abilities.

But here was Beleriand, rising back above the Sea.

It was not the same.

It was not empty.

Elrond watched as it all rose back up. He had always been gifted with sharp eyes, but now, he found that his powers of vision had increased a thousandfold, so that from this cliff in the Ered Luin, Elrond could see all of Beleriand, from Menegroth and Himring to Vinyamar and Brithombar. The great cities of Beleriand were left just as their own people had left them, battered and bloodied and broken open by Orcs or by other Edhil. They were gaping wounds upon a landscape that would never have been pristine even if the Edhil had never come here, for there would still have been Morgoth, seeking to mar the design of Ennor to suit his own visions. But they were not empty.

By the time that Elrond was born, Beleriand had been largely depopulated. So much of the blood of Doriath and Gondolin, mightiest kingdoms of Beleriand in the First Age, had been spilled in their fall, all of that promise mixed into the dirt so that it could never be extracted again. The blood of the Edhil and the Edain had been mixed into the earth so that it could not rise again to be a thorn in Morgoth’s side, and so _much_ of that blood had been stolen from the bodies it rightfully belonged to that by the time that Elrond was born, there was not enough strength left in Beleriand to field an army that could have ever hoped to stand against the terror of the North, and those who were left behind were nearly totally sapped of the courage that would have been required of them to ever take up arms against Angband again.

Sometimes, Elrond wondered what sort of world would have been his, if the Rodyn had never been persuaded by his father finally giving them the one and only thing that seemed capable of moving them to the slightest bit of compassion for the Edhil they had so emphatically wiped their hands of long ago. (Alright, perhaps judging _Ulmo_ that way was a tad unfair, but Elrond’s judgment of the others stood, and you’d be hard-pressed to convince him that he should think well of the Rodyn when, before they were given a Silmaril, they were content to turn their backs and let everyone in Ennor be enslaved or murdered. Giving him the gift of a land free of Morgoth by bribing the Rodyn was the only thing Eärendil had ever done for him. Elrond had not forgotten it.) Without the intervention of the Rodyn, Elrond could not think of a single thing that would have been able to dislodge Morgoth from his seat of power. And that power would only have waxed, and waxed, and waxed, until not only was it impossible to fight against it, it was impossible to hide from it or flee from it, and…

…And actually, Elrond was not so certain he wanted to wonder what the world would be like if Morgoth had never been cast into the Void, after all. He shuddered to think that the present, relatively peaceful state of this world was based on such a venal lot as the Rodyn, but it was hard to argue that the world would have been better off without them, unless their brother was excised from existence right alongside them.

The blood of the great and the good had been mixed with the tears of those who remained to water the world, but to no good end. This was a fertilizer that could yield nothing but further lamentation.

(Rían, great-grandmother, so young, so despairing, and in the end, alone. Rían, maker of music and of songs. Rían, who opened her heart to let it bleed upon the Anfauglith. Sometimes, Elrond wondered what songs she might have made, when she was confronted with so much death, with the end of all the hopes of her—of _their_ —people. Sometimes, Elrond could not imagine that there was anything she could have _said_ , let alone _sang_. We could not all be Lúthien, so self-possessed as to be capable of moving the stony heart of the Doomsman within the Doomsman’s own domain.

Very few of us could be Lúthien.

Only Lúthien could be Lúthien, in the end. When was one of her like ever supposed to come into the world once more? As for Rían, Elrond could only wish that he could push away the shadows that obscured so much of her memory from sight, and know her better. Though he knew not what and did not hope ever to know better, there was something that whispered to Elrond that he was the poorer for knowing so little about this particular great-grandmother.)

Even if the cities had not sunk beneath the surface of the Sea in the waking world, they could only have been left to crumble and rot until Ivon claimed her due and the stone and the wood from which those cities were constructed were returned to the earth that birthed them. Even now, with more children being born and some of the Ñoldor who had first come to Ennor during the War of Wrath having chosen to stay here after the war was concluded (they were, by a polite fiction, not officially acknowledged in such a fashion; instead, elaborate stories were formed regarding where these Ñoldor had lived during the First Age, usually Dorthonion or Hithlum or somewhere else that had fared so incredibly poorly when the Siege was broken that there were few left now who could have positively asserted that to be a falsehood), there just weren’t enough Edhil left in this part of Ennor to fill up all of those cities. You would have to go looking into the haunts of the Nandor and the Avari far to the south and the east to even _see_ about populating the dead cities of dead Beleriand, and Elrond had a hard time crediting that those Nandor and those Avari would _want_ to go to Beleriand, of all places.

And yet, the cities were not empty.

The wind came to Elrond on that high, grassless cliff, the creature of Aran Einior in the way that the Sea could _never_ be anyone’s creature, not even Ulmo’s, but very nearly as inscrutable. The wind came to Elrond on the cliff, bearing tidings of the fetid reek of briny decay. The Sea had spat out the cities it had once drowned, and all of the people it had downed alongside them. Why, Elrond could not begin to guess, and why go looking for answers from something as unfathomable as it was fathomless? You would only hurt your mind doing that. The Sea had spat out dead cities, and it had spat out dead Edhil and dead Men to crawl over them as ants crawled over corpses left out in the elements in the summertime.

He watched. There was nothing else to do in the landscape of the dream but to watch, and even had there been something else that Elrond might have looked at, he thought that to turn his gaze away would only have shown him the same sight as that he had just averted his eyes from.

The dead congregated in the dead cities that had been set aside for them. They shuffled and shambled, some of them falling to the ground when the rotting muscle on their legs finally disintegrated and they could not stay upright by their own strength any longer. They made mockery of life in their movements, going to and fro from marketplaces and wells and stables and inns, lighting corpse-candles that gave off a watery light in the windows of their homes, but even from such a distance, even with the reek of briny decay such in Elrond’s nostrils that, if he did not know _exactly_ what he was looking at and exactly what he was smelling, he could have believed it to be meat for a table that had been left out entirely too long when a homestead was abandoned, Elrond knew well what a mockery it was.

As far as dreams went, this one _had_ been short. It had been short, and as Elrond, woken in the middle of the night by some renewed twinging in his right hand, rolled over so as to keep the pressure off of his right arm and thought without much enthusiasm on what other dreams he might be drawn into once he drifted back off to sleep, he told himself that as some attempt at self-consolation. This dream had been short, and perhaps the others he experienced would be short as well.

But there was another consolation, in that at least with this one, Elrond did not have to grope around to try to derive some meaning from the strangeness of the dream. Beleriand was a land ruled over by the dead, where even the Rodyn held no power. After all, how could they claim to rule over a land that they themselves destroyed? No, Beleriand was the realm of dead things, now, to be ruled over and populated by corpses and whatever calcified fat might remain, littering a sea floor that had once been grassy plains.

The living had no place there.

-0-0-0-

The pain was…

Well.

When Elrond awoke the morning of his last full day on Tol Himling, the first thing that became clear to him when he awoke was that the sedative that Celebrimbor had given him had _fully_ worn off. He had no difficulty standing on his own or walking, he did not feel even slightly light-headed or nauseated when he went from sitting to standing, and the pain was…

Giving the pain a simple adjective seemed rather insufficient to describe something that felt more like a living thing that had chosen to take up residence inside of Elrond’s body, but Elrond was a loremaster-in-training, and though that did not necessarily make him a _writer_ , his chosen profession was writing-adjacent enough that he thought it necessary that he at least _try_.

Celebrimbor’s optimism had, if only to a small extent, actually been proven warranted. The pain was not as it was when it had first brought itself, screaming and all-consuming, to Elrond’s attention. Of course, it would not be _difficult_ for it to be less than it was, considering that Elrond was pretty certain that the only way it was possible for such pain as _that_ to get worse was to enter the zone where death was certain and the only means of relief to be found entailed speeding along the inevitable. That the pain was not what it had been did not necessarily mean very much. Elrond supposed he would have to be grateful that it meant anything at all.

The sedative had completely worn off, or at least its obvious effects had worn off, and it no longer served as any sort of hindrance to standing and walking and anything else that Elrond might have cared to do while he yet remained on the island. The sedative had worn off, and with it, its power to soothe the pain that had struck Elrond so low had been entirely dissipated.

He could stand. He could walk. He could talk. If he had cared to, he could have screamed. The pain was not so intense as to render Elrond incapable of these things. It was not even that it was on the _border_ of rendering him incapable of these basic functions of his life. …Yes, screaming counted. There had been many occasions during his life when the ability to scream had spelled the distance between living and dying, since Elrond’s being able to scream got Maglor and _especially_ Maedhros to his location all the quicker.

The pain did not prevent him from doing those things that were necessary for the daily functions of life. The pain did not even seriously _hinder_ performance of those daily functions, though doing them one-handed certainly counted as a hindrance of some level that did not quite approach seriousness. Instead, the pain felt…

It really was difficult to describe. Even though it was not powerful enough to rob Elrond of any power he possessed to speak or think, it still presented him with some difficulties, and in particular was proving that Elrond still had some way to go before he could really consider himself a competent _writer_.

When he thought about it, when he focused on it, not that he wanted to focus on it much, it felt a little like thread. If pain could be described as thread, and his body as cloth, it felt as if someone had taken a needle and stitched the cloth that was his hand and forearm tight and stubborn with this thread that was pain. The stitches were neat and tight, and they would not be yanked out quickly or easily.

Elrond had never thought of pain as something that could be efficient. It had never occurred to him to think of it in such a manner before, and if it ever had, he most likely would have thought that a strange way to think about pain. For a moment, he wondered if Maedhros would have ever… But no. The Maedhros he had known had had a strange relationship with pain, his shadow, his constant creeping companion, but Elrond did not think that Maedhros would ever have considered pain something to be praised.

Elrond had never thought of pain as something that could be efficient, but he was currently learning to reevaluate his past opinions. Certainly, this pain seemed determined to eke as much suffering and as much inconvenience from him as possible. He tried not to dwell on it, really, he did; it was easy to become transfixed upon it, and if he dwelled on it _deliberately_ , it was difficult to stop. But it was impossible to ignore it entirely, and Elrond suspected that to be an arrangement that suited the pain very well.

Given that Elrond was well enough to stand and to walk totally unaided, without any fear of finding himself becoming rapidly and ungently acquainted with the ground, he would have liked to resume his inspection of the castle. Doing so on his last full day on Tol Himling would have gone a long way towards redeeming his inability to do so yesterday. But the pain, while it was not all-encompassing, was distracting enough that Elrond had to be honest with himself: he could not work like this. He would not have been able to concentrate well enough to take down decent notes, even had it been his left hand that had been struck down like this and not his right. Anything he tried to write today would have been completely unusable afterwards.

And there was something else as well.

The pain in his hand was still great enough that if Elrond wished to take any notes at all, he would have to ask Celebrimbor to take them down for him, once again.

Elrond… He and Celebrimbor were still not quite speaking to one another.

Oh, there had been _words_ that had passed between them. When Celebrimbor had woken, a few minutes after Elrond, he had come to sit by Elrond’s pallet and ask him about his hand, inquiring after the pain and whether it felt any better or any worse. But once he had gotten that out of the way, he had averted his gaze, jaw working, and said no more to Elrond. They had gone up to the courtyard as they had done the day before, where they found a fine drizzle wetting the space outside the shelter of the veranda just enough that Elrond would not have wanted to go out into the overgrown tangles of grass and bushes, and there they had stayed, ever since.

It was late afternoon, now. Elrond could see no sign of Anor through the clouds, but the sky had been darkening just enough for him to guess that Anor had begun her descent towards the western horizon in earnest. Somewhere in Valinor, there were Edhil who were watching the last fruit of Laurelin come closer and closer towards what should have been her home forever, and instead spent only a scant few hours shining her light over the withered corpse of her parent. Maybe the sky was clear over there. Perhaps where there were clouds over Ennor, there were clouds also over Valinor. Elrond did not care for the idea that Valinor was so much a world apart that there was no chance that the skies could look the same, but neither could he force himself to consider it plausible that the skies over Valinor often looked exactly the same as the skies over Ennor, even the western shores of Ennor.

Well. Elrond considered biting back the sigh, but after a moment’s contemplation, decided not to bother. He sighed often without ever considering whether or not he had earned it, but he definitely thought he had earned the sigh this time.

Well. This foray into Himring had not gone particularly as Elrond had thought it would. No, it had not gone as Elrond had thought it would at all.

He… He had just thought it would be so _simple_ , which Elrond recognized in retrospect to be an amateur mistake. Nothing was ever simple, especially not with him. There was always some complication that would be stumbled over eventually, though typically the complications were not so numerous, nor so diverse. Elrond chanced a glance at Celebrimbor, who had taken up a similar position as he had the day before, all the way on the other side of the courtyard from where Elrond was sitting. The complications did sometimes shape themselves in the forms of Edhil, but the nature of such had not typically been so…

Well.

Elrond hoped that his report, such as it was, from the notes he had managed to gather before everything had gone sideways, would be enough to satisfy Gil-galad. He knew that if he told Gil-galad that he’d been unable to work properly on the latter two full days he spent on Tol Himling because he’d lost the use of his hand, Gil-galad would excuse any deficiencies he found in the level of detail contained in the report; it was comforting to know that his liege lord was a reasonable man, and did not ask those who answered to him to move mountains. Gil-galad would excuse the deficiencies, if deficiencies he found, but that would not change the fact that Gil-galad would find the report wanting. That was not what Elrond had wanted; that was the absolute opposite of what Elrond had wanted. He had wanted to give a report that would impress, wanted to give a report that would prove enticing enough that even all the ghosts in the town at night wouldn’t be enough to put explorers off the idea of coming to Tol Himling to search for all that could be found. The idea that all of this could end in disappointment was maddening.

_I had best make the most of what I have. The treasure vaults, at least, will be enough for many of those who can be persuaded at all._

Though he knew it to be fruitless, Elrond had turned his attention once more to the battered little book of alchemy he had found in the library. It was not as if he had anything _better_ to do, and since he knew so little about alchemy that even had the book been in better condition, the ink which the words had been written in less faded and the ink that had been used to deface so many of the pages had not been present at all, the pain in Elrond’s hand would not have proven too much of a hindrance, since Elrond’s own ignorance already proved the greatest hindrance possible.

It also served as something to do that was not staring at Celebrimbor like some grotesque combination of overcurious child and lecher, but that was not the whole of Elrond’s reasons. Do not mistake him.

Elrond could not shake the feeling that there was something here that he was missing, some piece of information that, if he was able to grasp it, would have made all of this make sense in his mind, even if it was not accompanied by a greater understanding of alchemy. He could not grasp onto that scrap of information, could not reach for it except to have it slip through his fingers, but he knew it to be close. There it was, lurking just out of reach, lurking just beyond the closeness Elrond would have needed to make out its features clearly.

His ignorance was not reassuring. Ignorance was _never_ reassuring, but in this case, it was especially irksome. Elrond could not see what secrets a random book he had happened upon equally randomly in the library could possess that were likely to affect him in any way, but though it was not practical, he could not shake the feeling from his mind.

You know, he really ought to consider whether or not he wanted to take the book back with him when they left the island. His pack was waterproof enough that it would likely not be damaged from exposure to the Sea, provided that Elrond did not leave the book close to the top or any of the sides. There were not too many alchemists in Lindon at present, but there were a couple in the capital, and one of them was an Exile who would not have turned away a book Elrond brought to her from a Fëanorian fortress, provided that Elrond did not advertise the book’s origins too loudly in wider circles before bringing it to her. Much as Elrond would have liked to be the one to personally unlock the secrets of the book, his curiosity was piqued enough that he would have been somewhat content to have those secrets unlocked by another, if they could be unlocked at all.

_That does assume that this is the same form of alchemy as the one that she practices. It could be something completely different, something she has no familiarity with, and it may prove just as mysterious to her as it has to me._

It was likely better not to get his hopes up. But it was something to consider.

Elrond had not planned to involve Celebrimbor in his inquiries regarding the book. Celebrimbor’s reactions to the island and the castle had been disquieting enough to Elrond that he had not intended to prevail upon him in such a way, and certainly not while they were still in Himring itself. Never let it be said that Elrond was totally devoid of sensitivity. If he was ever going to bring it up to Celebrimbor, he was only going to bring it up after they had gotten some distance, both in terms of space and in time.

Celebrimbor himself, _he_ turned out to have other plans.

“What is it that you have been reading?”

Incomprehensible it might have been to Elrond, but there was no denying that the book itself was absorbing. Though the stones beneath them were firm and hard and would certainly have heralded Celebrimbor’s approach, Elrond had heard none of it.

So when Celebrimbor’s voice sounded just a few inches above his head, Elrond jumped, jerking his head up only to jerk it _back_ when Celebrimbor’s face showed itself maybe a foot from his own. While he had been… reading wasn’t the correct word, but given that he had no way of deciphering anything, ‘studying’ did not feel like the right word either… While Elrond had been reading, Celebrimbor had come over to where he was sitting, and then leaned down so far at the waist that Elrond wouldn’t have been surprised if Celebrimbor told him that he had intended to try to read the book upside down.

Elrond let out a hot breath. “Don’t _do_ that.”

Celebrimbor tilted his head to one side. “I did call to you.”

That would be a mark in the book’s favor, then. Or a mark in Elrond’s detriment. He’d work that out later. For now, there was the question that Celebrimbor had asked, which Elrond had at least managed to hear in its entirety. There was the fact that Celebrimbor was speaking to him again at all, at least regarding something that was not the state of his hand. That was more than enough impetus for Elrond to speak. “It… It is a book I found in the library.” Elrond chanced another glance down at the pages he had been looking over—there was what to call it—and sure enough, there was nothing that had become any more comprehensible to him since he had turned his gaze away. “Truth be told, I do not actually understand any of it, but there is something about the book I find engrossing.”

Obviously, since he had been studying it for this long already without throwing it against a wall in frustration. Of course, Elrond had never been especially keen on the idea of throwing books, even ones that frustrated him, but there had to be a first time for everything. Just not this time, though.

“What is it about? Can you tell that much?”

Basic questions, but Elrond was grateful for them as anything that signaled some relief, either to Celebrimbor’s malaise, or to the nature of the silence that had persisted between them for a little over a day, now. He tried to muster a smile to give with his response—didn’t quite manage it, but hoped that the result would be pleasant to look at, anyways. “Alchemy, I believe. I was planning to take it to an alchemist I know in the capital once we have returned to Lindon.”

Celebrimbor responded by getting down on one knee in front of where Elrond sat. Though his gaze was firmly fixed on the book, never once flickering from it to Elrond’s face, his tone was reasonably light as he offered, “Or you may not need to wait that long at all. I may be able to tell you some of the secrets of the book.”

“ _You_?” And Elrond was _almost_ able to match the lightness in Celebrimbor’s tone, for he had never heard of Celebrimbor, as multi-talented as he apparently was, having much to do with alchemy, and while the man had been alive long enough and spent enough of his living years in a state of relative obscurity, overshadowed by more famous relatives, to have gathered the knowledge he would need to decipher the symbols in this book, Elrond could not help but think it just a _little_ more likely that whatever it was, it was arising from the same side of himself that Celebrimbor had shown yesterday. And so long as Celebrimbor did not compare him to Lúthien once again, Elrond did not particularly mind.

Celebrimbor held his hands out as deflection, though Elrond caught sight of his lips twitching. “I do not claim expert status for myself; I can already hear my old tutor rousing himself from his grave to snatch my ear and tell me to take it back. But I work with magic enough with my other materials in the forge that a grounding in alchemy was considered prudent. I never reached the advanced theories, but if the symbols in that book are Exilic, I should be able to tell you what they stand for.”

Elrond raised an eyebrow. “What about diagrams?”

“I should at least be able to tell you what they were intended to _make_.”

Well, hmm. Elrond had not intended to trouble Celebrimbor over this book until they had gotten back to Lindon, until Tol Himling had had time to fade a little from their memories, but if Celebrimbor was _volunteering_ to take a look at the book, Elrond was hardly going to stop him. Perhaps it was even a book that Celebrimbor had handled before. That would certainly help them in deciphering what the book was supposed to be communicating to its readers.

…Though if Celebrimbor was the one responsible for the jagged streaks of black ink defacing the pages of the book, Elrond was going to have _words_ for him. That, and he sincerely doubted he would ever look upon Celebrimbor as favorably again.

“Ah, very well, then.” Elrond handed the book over to Celebrimbor, just a little gingerly, though more in deference to the fragility of the book than to how he thought that Celebrimbor might handle it. He’d never thought of Celebrimbor as the sort of person who would harm a book, not seriously. Elrond was not certain what a book-defacer looked like, but he was pretty sure that the signs of such evil (do not try to tell him that it was _not_ evil) would show up in the face of someone capable of it. He could see no sign of such marring Celebrimbor’s features.

Celebrimbor sat down properly to examine the book. He paused over the cover for a few moments, frowning, his brow furrowed. There was something about his expression that made Elrond stiffen, if only for a moment. It was as if Celebrimbor was trying to rake something out of the back of his mind and bring it into the forefront of his memory. Elrond, when he thought about it, thought he recognized that expression.

When he thought about it, he thought it might be a mirror for the times when he had been presented with something that he could not quite grasp at the truth of, but thought he could see the general shape of. He thought it might be a mirror for the times when Elrond had realized a second before he fully grasped what he was looking at that it was something that had the power to reach out and bite him.

It was not a comforting expression to see unfurling over Celebrimbor’s face as he pored over the cover of the book. Elrond sucked in a deep breath, and told himself that whatever it was, it was unlikely to be something that could bite them both. Whatever it was, if it was something fit to bite the one who understood it, surely it wasn’t something that could be fatal. Surely.

Eventually, Celebrimbor opened the book, and Elrond let out a breath that he’d not realized he had been holding.

Not that he wasn’t sucking that breath right back in once Celebrimbor opened the book and began his inspection in earnest.

The first few pages, the ink was so faded that whoever had defaced the book had apparently decided that there was no need to do their violence in fresher ink upon those pages. When Celebrimbor looked upon those first few pages, his face still clung to the expression that had come over it when he first looked down at the cover. He looked still like he was trying to grasp at what was nagging at the back of his mind, like he was still trying to peer close enough at it to see if those were teeth in its jaws, or if the light was just reflecting oddly off of the back of its mouth.

But when Celebrimbor came to the first of the pages where the original writing had been in ink still strong enough that the slashes of black ink overtop were first considered ‘necessary’, he froze. It was not merely that he had stilled. If he had stilled, that would have been insufficient to describe the change that had come over him.

It was not just that he had stilled suddenly. It was that he had frozen, so utterly that if someone was to tell him that this was a statue, perhaps the work of Nerdanel Celebrimbor’s grandmother, he would hardly have been surprised. Looking at Celebrimbor, _peering_ at Celebrimbor’s face and chest, Elrond could not immediately make out that Celebrimbor was breathing at all.

Not that Elrond was breathing particularly well himself.

Well, the secret of the book did turn out to be something that had teeth. Elrond had never seen someone pull quite the face that Celebrimbor had now pulled if they _weren’t_ being gnawed on by especially sharp teeth.

What teeth, though?

Elrond’s pulse quickened as he watched Celebrimbor thaw, watched Celebrimbor’s expression darken as he flipped through the book with increasing speed, until the pages were flying and Celebrimbor could not _possibly_ have been looking at each one long enough to even _see_ , let alone _understand_ what was written down on the page, even if he could see anything all past the slash marks. What teeth, though? His heart was pounding so hard in his throat that he felt as if he would be sick. What sort of teeth did the thing have?

No.

_No_ , that was _not_ the way to approach this. Whatever it was, it had no power to hurt them, no power at all.

But that only applied to physical harm. When Elrond was walking on a beach and his foot struck something round and hard buried beneath the surface of the sand, the sick thrill of dread that ignited within him in the moment before he knew for certain whether he had come upon a rock or a skull was not something that could hurt him, was not something that could put a single scratch or a single bruise on his body. He could not come to physical harm over it.

But knowing that reaching down to dig into the sand would not hurt him, even if he did find a skull there, as he had more than once before (Elrond _had_ learned to stay away from the beaches, even if he had learned that lesson a little late for his own peace of mind; at least the years had finally gone down far enough that he was unlikely to find any scraps of flesh clinging to those skulls any longer, and at _least_ people had stopped finding severed feet on the beaches a while back), did not erase the dread from Elrond’s heart. Knowing that something he dreaded could not actually hurt him could not calm him.

Sometimes, Elrond wondered if his own past had not ruined him. Dread had been his constant companion throughout his entire life. Its sour scent had always been in his nose, even before he was old enough to be cognizant of what it meant, before he was old enough to understand the meaning of the stretched-taut expressions on the faces of the adults around him, before he was old enough to understand what those livid red lights that shone from the north at night were supposed to be. Even before he had known what to name it, he had known dread. He had hoped that when the world changed and this new Age was upon them, perhaps he could leave it behind, but no, that had never come to pass for him.

There was no longer the future to dread. Instead, the past that Elrond had thought would be left behind had never left _him._

There were some things he did not want to leave behind, of course. There were _many_ things he had not wanted to leave behind, things that if he tried to excise them from himself and his life, would have torn him apart in the process. He could not speak it, but he still _knew_ it. But even those things he did not wish to cast into the abyss alongside dead and drowned Beleriand were enough to inspire dread, eventually, and as for the rest of it…

What was drowned and buried was typically dead. That did not meant that what was dead was _gone_.

And what was dead and not gone, it might have only phantom teeth that could not draw even a single drop of blood, but that did not mean that when it sank its phantom teeth into Elrond’s living flesh, he would not feel the bite, all the same.

He ought not think about the past as something that could hurt him. There were many who would tell him that it was not rational. But there were days when it seemed as if the past did nothing _but_ hurt Elrond, and even if the wounds never showed on his skin, he could still feel them crawling beneath.

He did not underestimate the power of words to do harm. Not if the author was dead, and _certainly_ not if the book those words belonged to was familiar to the one who was reading it.

Elrond swallowed hard on something in his throat that he thought might be a scream, though considering the places his thoughts were currently trying to go, it might well have been a sob. Something was rattling in his chest that felt like a sob. When he trusted enough that his voice would actually sound like something that was actually _him_ , he asked, “What is it?”

Celebrimbor did not answer him at first. He was still flipping through the book, though he had slowed down as he neared the end of the book, where the diagrams were fewer and the inky slash marks were also considerably fewer. His expression darkened further with each page that passed by his hands, his mouth twisting into a deep scowl. The expression was unlike any that Elrond had ever seen on his face—even the bitterness he had exhibited in the library had not brought with it anything like _this_. Perhaps this was the sort of face he showed when he accidentally broke something in the forge or when he knocked a set of pliers into the fire, but somehow, Elrond did not think so. Celebrimbor’s face seemed more readily made for wry and rueful humor in the face of such things than the anger that Elrond would have expected of such personalities as—

“You know,” Celebrimbor said suddenly, and the sheer _casualness_ in his voice made the hairs on the back of Elrond’s neck stand on end, “I tried not to think about this book, truly I did.” He was _almost_ smiling, but his lips had curdled and twisted just far back enough that Elrond could see teeth gleaming in the murky light of this rainy afternoon. “But when I did think about it, I hoped Maedhros had used it for kindling in the years between the Bragollach and the Nirnaeth. I doubt there were too many trees left in the north of Beleriand that Thingol did not claim for his own, and all of the peat in the world can do you little good when you cannot harvest it without Orc raiding parties using you for target practice. _This_ book would have served Maedhros and Maglor and anyone else who managed to make their way here no better than to be used for kindling, and _yet_ —“ his nostrils flared, chest heaving as a long, harsh breath that never did come built up inside of him “—and _yet_ , this thing remains. I could be surprised, but I am not.” The bitterness that dripped from his mouth was so caustic that Elrond expected to see it burn his lips. “I know my kin too well.”

He was looking at Elrond, now. His eyes were over-bright, though Elrond could see no tears gathering at their edges. He was looking at Elrond, so intently that Elrond half-expected to feel his skin begin to burn, but Elrond had no idea what Celebrimbor was looking for in his face. Celebrimbor’s face was so open, but it opened on nothing that Elrond could understand.

He could only ask: “Celebrimbor, what is it that is in the book?”

Celebrimbor handed him the book back without answering. For a moment, he looked rather more like he was going to hurl the book at a patch of wall some distance from them, his body tensing up as if readying for the throw—and then he let all of that tension out, slowly, laboriously, and he did indeed hand Elrond the book back, though his hand was clenched so tightly against the book that when Elrond accepted the book back, he could easily make out the indentations of Celebrimbor’s fingers in the aged leather.

If Elrond had been expecting Celebrimbor to answer him now, he was doomed to be disappointed. Having relieved himself of the burden of carrying such an apparently loathsome book, Celebrimbor sprang to his feet. He sucked in a long, sharp breath, and this time, let it out just as sharply. “I’m going.”

As foolish as it might make him sound, there was nothing for Elrond to do but ask another obvious question, in ever so slightly apprehensive a tone, “Where exactly are you supposed to be going?”

With a tone of finality akin to slamming the door shut on a crypt, “The wine cellar.”

_Now_ Elrond found himself getting to his feet, if rather more slowly than Celebrimbor—the sedative might have worn off, but he was still at least a little wary of himself. “…The wine cellar.”

Someone listening to a retelling of this exchange later might mock him for his manner, but quite frankly, Elrond would defend his own reactions to the last. What _else_ was he supposed to have done, in the face of that?

As he started down the veranda towards an opening where the door had long since rotted away, leaving a few scraps of wood clinging to the hinges, Celebrimbor snapped, without looking at Elrond, “ _Yes_ , Elrond, the wine cellar. After coming across _that_ , I daresay I need a drink. If you wish for answers, then follow me.”

Elrond wished for answers very much, even if he could feel their jaws closing around his all-too-vulnerable arms and legs. He followed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Aran Einior** —Manwë  
>  **Ivon** —Yavanna
> 
> **Anor** —the Sindarin name for the Sun  
>  **Edain** —Men of the three houses (the Houses of Bëor, Hador and Haleth) who were faithful to the Elves throughout the First Age; after the War of Wrath they were gifted with the land of Númenor and became known as the Dúnedain; after the Akallabêth they established Arnor and Gondor (singular: Adan) (Sindarin)  
>  **Edhel** —Elf (plural: Edhil) (Sindarin)  
>  **Edhil** —Elves (singular: Edhel) (Sindarin)  
>  **Ennor** —Middle-Earth (Sindarin)  
>  **Ered Luin** —“The Blue Mountains” (Sindarin); the mountain range at the far western border of Eriador, that in the Years of the Trees and the First Age served as the border between Eriador and Beleriand. It was also known as the Ered Lindon, the Mountains of the Land of the Singers, Lindon being a name given to the region of the Ossiriand by the Ñoldor, derived from the Nandorin Lindānā.  
>  **Iathrim** —the Sindar of Doriath  
>  **Laegrim** —the Green-Elves of Ossiriand (singular: Laegel) (plural: Laegil; Laegrim is class-plural term); the division of the Nandor who followed Denethor, son of Lenwë; the name was imposed upon them by the Sindar, because of the lush forests of their land, because of their especial love for the forests and waters of their land, and because the Laegrim often dressed in green as camouflage  
>  **Lisgardh** —A marshy region by the Mouths of Sirion, a land of reeds that grow man-high and dense as a forest. Its name in earlier drafts was ‘Arlisgion,’ translated in The Book of Lost Tales 2 as “the place of reeds” (155).  
>  **Onodrim** —the Sindarin name given to the Ents (Sindarin) (singular: Onod)  
>  **Rodyn** —Valar (singular: Rodon) (Sindarin): a common Sindarin name for the Valar


	21. Chapter Twenty-One

Of all the things that Elrond had considered when he had been thinking about what he could expect to find in Himring Castle, a wine cellar had never entered into it. Just one of many other things that he had thought that Maedhros would deem too frivolous to be entertained, though once he had gotten a good look at the castle for the first time, he would have been better off putting from his mind thoughts of what Maedhros did and did not consider frivolous. Another reason he should have considered that there might have been a wine cellar here: even during the Siege, there had been many years of peace, many years when any lord of Beleriand might entertain guests within their own home, and a well-stocked table was universally considered a requirement for decent hospitality to guests. Maedhros, always so conscious of his obligations, would have been conscious of the need to provide hospitality, even if he did not partake himself.

Not that Elrond could credit that Celebrimbor _seriously_ thought that there would be anything left in the wine cellar now. Wine bottles, like books, were relatively portable if you only carried one or two of them on your person at a time, and wine bottles, like books, could be quite valuable if you needed to barter for supplies. If more than a few people had gotten the same idea while the castle was being evacuated, the wine cellar could well be as empty as Elrond had expected the library to be, and honestly, though it pained him to admit it, he thought it might be more likely. Wine and books were both valuable. Wine had the advantage, though, of being something that Edhil could drink on long journeys to find safe havens, of being something that could be administered as an analgesic before medical procedures were carried out. To those who were fleeing for their lives and had very little time to decide what to take with them, wine could well have been rated higher than books.

He suspected that telling Celebrimbor as much would fall on deaf ears. Given the long, restless strides with which Celebrimbor cut a straight path to the main kitchens in the castle, Elrond suspected that the only thing that would satisfy for Celebrimbor would be to see the state of the wine cellar for himself.

For what felt like the thousandth time his mind had touched upon the subject these last few minutes, as Elrond struggled to keep up with Celebrimbor, he wondered what could possibly have been in that book to provoke such a reaction. He could think of a few things that might have touched too close for Celebrimbor’s comfort, but to touch _this_ close? There, Elrond’s imagination failed him.

_I’ll have the answers out of him. Even if it is only when he is imagining getting himself drunk off of wine that is no longer here and likely wouldn’t be drinkable even if it was, I’ll have those answers out of him._

“I never wanted to come here, you know,” Celebrimbor called back to him as they entered a spacious chamber that from the proliferation of ovens and racks upon racks of pots and pans and other cookware lit up by the gloomy half-light of rainy afternoon verging on rainy evening, could only have been the main kitchens. His voice was almost light, but if light it was, then it was the lightness of a dead and withered plant, just before the wind finally wrenched it from the dry soil that could no longer sustain it. “I never wanted to lay eyes on this place again.”

Elrond’s eyebrows shot up. There was one question answered, though he had thought it would take considerably more effort to drag it out where it could be seen and recognized. Feeling the sudden need to press his luck, he pried, if cautiously, “Then why did you come here?”

No need for caution, it would turn out. No need at all.

Celebrimbor laughed hollowly. “Ereinion asked me to. Mind, he asked me at first without telling me why he was asking, so at the first, I refused him. But then he said that you would be coming here, and alone, if no guide could be found for you.”

Elrond’s mouth twisted. “I don’t think Gil-galad would have let me come here _alone_ ,” and he could not quite keep the bitterness out of his voice as he spoke.

“That only occurred to me once we were already halfway here, and it was too late to turn around.” Another hollow laugh, like someone banging a hammer on the inside of a tomb, hollow enough that Elrond chose not to take offense to the idea that Celebrimbor might have turned tail and left him to travel the rest of the way on his own. “He told me that you would come here alone, if no guide could be found, and that I could not abide. He… He may also have said to me that of the potential guides who _could_ be found, I would be the best-suited for your purpose in coming here.”

“And you have been,” Elrond said quietly. There was nothing else to say. Nothing that would make that any less the truth.

Nothing that would make that any consolation to Celebrimbor, either, considering everything.

“I underestimated Ereinion’s capacity for shameless flattery.” Celebrimbor stopped before a door of dark wood, his hand pressed to the splintered panels. His hand was shaking ever so slightly, making the door, which had clearly grown loose on its hinges at some point since the castle was last occupied, rattle. “He and I will have to discuss it once I have returned to court.”

Elrond looked him over, eyes lingering on Celebrimbor’s trembling hand. A weight was growing in the pit of his stomach, hard and cold. Finally, he asked, very quietly, “Why was it that you wished not to return?”

Celebrimbor did not answer him. Celebrimbor did not look at him. Celebrimbor pushed, and the door opened, revealing darkness.

Given the distance they had had to traverse to reach the auxiliary kitchen where they were sleeping, Elrond would have expected a long descent, but instead, the lamp, clumsily drawn from Celebrimbor’s bag, illuminated ten, perhaps twelve steps carved into the earth. Steep steps they might have been, but still, it was not so long a walk as all that.

And soon, Elrond was looking upon the wine cellar of Himring Castle.

If you were expecting something grand, you will have to learn to live with disappointment. Elrond did not know much about wine cellars, but even he could guess, just looking around, that compared to what was typically found in castles of this size and relative importance, the wine cellar was more than a little paltry. Here, at last, he had found something that reflected properly Maedhros’s pragmatism, even if it meant forgoing certain comforts.

Elrond stopped counting the stone racks after twelve, but he did not think there were very many more than that. Celebrimbor hung the lamp from a hook, illuminating the racks closest to the stairs relatively well, but in this windowless chamber it did not take long for everything to be washed away into the dark.

It was not so dark that Elrond could not make out gleams of glass, though.

Stopped on the bottom step, Elrond watched in something approaching incredulity as Celebrimbor began to pull a monumentally dusty bottle out of one of the openings in the rack nearest to the stairs. There were still bottles here? _Really_? Elrond knew that the residents could not have had that much advance warning before fleeing, but they would still have had _some_ , and… _really_?

There were not _that_ many bottles left here, Elrond noted, when he ripped his gaze from Celebrimbor long enough to look out over the rest of what the lamp painted incandescent blue. It was just now occurring to Elrond as well that there would likely have been no new bottles coming in in the years between the Bragollach and the Nirnaeth. That could account for the lack of bottles here as easily as the residents taking some with them when they evacuated.

Still, _really_?

Celebrimbor pulled the dust-coated bottle free with a rough, and yet almost musical scraping noise. A cloud of dust slowly drifted to the floor, joined by yet more flurries as Celebrimbor wiped the accumulated dust and grime of decades from a wine bottle that had been meant to be drunk decades, if not centuries ago. If that occurred to Celebrimbor, he gave no mention of it. “I was never much of an expert on years,” he said instead, tinny, the casualness in his voice more obviously forced than ever. “’Wine is wine,’ I said, and Caranthir scoffed at me and asked my father how he managed to raise such a dullard.”

Elrond frowned deeply, his skin feeling stretched tight over his… his whole body, honestly. “Celebrimbor—“

“But wine really is just wine.” He did not seem to have heard. “Caranthir could say what he liked, but years made little difference to me. It all tasted the same.”

He had come now to the cork. Here, at last, Elrond hoped that Celebrimbor might be halted, but instead, he watched, torn between being dismayed and oddly impressed, as Celebrimbor simply wrenched the cork from the neck of the bottle completely unaided. It came out with a horrible screeching noise that Elrond did _not_ think he was supposed to be hearing when someone removed a cork from a wine bottle, even if they weren’t using a corkscrew, but that did not seem to be enough to stop Celebrimbor, either.

Casting the cork to the ground, Celebrimbor said viciously, the tremor moving now to his shoulders, “Wine is wine, and they are not _here_ anymore.”

Elrond didn’t really know what he was supposed to say to that.

At last, Celebrimbor seemed to remember that Elrond was there. He nodded, holding up the bottle, an odd, lightless smile playing on his lips. “Did you want some? There is only one person left who could gainsay us, and I will not tell him if you don’t.”

Elrond’s skin did not feel tight. Elrond’s skin was crawling. But curiosity was still capable of driving him, and concern had added its voice into the fray as well. Elrond yet desired answers. Elrond yet desired a great many things—the smile was odd and frankly hair-raising, but there was something strangely compelling about it, as well. And Celebrimbor was not behaving like one whom Elrond would have felt comfortable leaving to his own devices.

He considered his right hand, whose pain, though it had dulled a little these past few hours, was still considerable. Perhaps the alcohol would be strong enough to dull that pain a little further.

This was probably a bad idea, Elrond considered, as he descended the last step. Many things had been bad ideas, and he had done them anyways.

Elrond smiled crookedly, though it turned slightly sour in his heart. The moment his feet had hit the earthen floor, a strong smell of slightly damp soil, though this floor appeared completely dry to his eyes, erupted in his nostrils, making his head swim. “Who am I to pass up the offer of getting drunk in somebody else’s cellar?”

“That’s the spirit.” Celebrimbor sat heavily upon the earthen floor, the wine sloshing dangerously in his bottle as he paid no mind to it.

Strange that he would pay no mind, since the whole reason he had come here was to get something to drink, but there was little about this place that wasn’t strange somehow, and Celebrimbor had turned strange about halfway to the port, and Elrond ought not to think too hard about the strangeness anymore. It would have been easier to mark out that which was not strange. When doing so, Elrond would have needed to cut out himself along with everything else that he had found here that was strange. He had no intention of throwing himself away.

He had no intention of throwing himself away. He needed to remember that. Even if bits and pieces of him wound up being thrown to the slaughterhouse floor, the greater part of him needed to remain intact.

Elrond sat down at Celebrimbor’s side, one of his eyebrows slowly drifting towards his hairline as he watched Celebrimbor take a long draught from the bottle, throat working as he swallowed gulp after gulp of wine. When he took the bottle from his lips, it did not seem as if he had drank all that much of the wine—the bottle was perhaps a foot and a half long, and the wine now sat about two inches off the base of the neck; small gulps, perhaps? Still, if that was a sign of things to come…

No, Elrond had nothing to fear. Not from Celebrimbor.

…The latter point, he convinced himself of fairly quickly. Celebrimbor had never seemed anything more than harmless, even in those early days when all Elrond knew of him were the whispers of those who did not trust him, thanks to those whose blood Celebrimbor shared; neither Maglor nor Maedhros had ever told Elrond or Elros tales of the nephew who had disavowed them both long before they had ever done anything in Beleriand that would have warranted disavowing. Whether or not there was nothing at all to fear here was another matter entirely.

_What we carry with us. It’s what we carry with us._

That was not reassuring.

It was what it was.

Elrond held his hand out for the bottle, mouth twisting in something close to a frown. “Are you going to give that to me, or not?”

“Of course. I think the taste has suffered a little since it was bottled,” Celebrimbor remarked with false lightness. “But you may as well try it for yourself.” He passed the bottle into Elrond’s hand. “See what you think of it?”

It was with something approaching giddiness that Elrond reached over with his left hand, having to twist his body at the waist to do so, to take the wine bottle out of Celebrimbor’s hand. He’d not been thinking of it at all before he had learned of the wine cellar, had not been thinking of it at all until he was _in_ the wine cellar, if he was being very honest, but after everything else, he thought having a drink did not sound like such a bad idea. Alright, so drinking decades-old, if not _centuries_ -old alcohol was not the _best_ idea, and Elrond did not typically consider alcohol a good solution to stress, but this was not a typical situation and he did not have any other means of exorcising his own stress— _well_ , Elrond thought, taking a surreptitious glance Celebrimbor’s way as he shook the bottle ever so slightly, he did not have any means of exorcising stress that would be particularly appropriate, either for the setting, or for certain other reasons, if he could even work himself up to it, if he could come to the moment and not find himself too squeamish.

He’d not drink too much.

He would _not_ drink too much.

(He’d not been considering what Celebrimbor might tell him when he had made that resolution. He would soon learn the folly of it.)

Elrond spent a little more time in contemplation of the bottle and its contents than Celebrimbor had before drinking it. Like Celebrimbor, Elrond was not what anyone would call an aficionado when it came to wine, though in his case, it was a distant cousin responding to admissions of such by gasping in somewhat affected shock, rather than an uncle calling him a dullard. He drank alcohol primarily at feasts and official dinners, favoring water or non-alcoholic juices otherwise; the taste could be pleasant—very pleasant, in special cases—but generally was not worth the headache Elrond would be dealing with the following morning, if he was not very careful about the degree to which he indulged.

That did not mean that he had no preferences. Elrond might be very young by the standards of many of the Edhil whom he lived alongside of, but he had been living at court, in what was—by default, to be fair—the richest court of any kingdom of the Edhil in Ennor, for long enough to have developed some preferences where alcohol was concerned.

He liked wine. Red wines in particular, which this appeared to be, for unless something had gone _very_ wrong with it, the darkness of the liquid sloshing around in the bottle certainly suggested that it was a red wine.

Elrond regarded the color. It was difficult to make out any particular hue in such a dark place as this, where the only light biased everything towards a pale, almost watery blue, and turned everything that was dark to begin with something close to black. He did hold to his earlier opinion that it was a red wine, and though he could not tell for true, likely a very dark red wine, as well. In its prime, it would likely have had a very strong flavor, and perhaps a great deal of alcohol in it, as well. Elrond preferred something a little sweeter, a little less strong—though mulled wines were excellent on the most bitterly cold of winter nights—but beggars could not be choosers, and he was not drinking for the taste this evening. If there was any taste left.

The smell he got from the taking a sniff at the lip of the bottle was… erm… Yes, Elrond thought Celebrimbor was right: the taste might have suffered just a _bit_ over the years the bottle had spent sitting in the cellar, never being drunk and instead gathering dust and grime and whatever else gathered in a wine cellar. (It was only now occurring to Elrond that perhaps he should have been a little warier of mold at the start, though thankfully, now that he was in here properly, he could detect no mold at all; at the very least, he got not the slightest whiff of it in the air.) You did not get smells like this from wine bottles that had _not_ been gathering dust in a dark cellar for decades while everyone who might have had occasion to drink them was dying horribly at the hands of every foul thing to haunt Beleriand, along with every Edhel who was attacked by them and, not unreasonably, did not particularly wish to die. Generally speaking, wine bottles that existed in happier circumstances were drank long before they could get the point that they smelled like something that made Elrond seriously consider for a moment whether or not he wanted to drink this at all.

But only for a moment. Only for a moment.

And given the sort of smell he was getting from this bottle, Elrond deemed it better not to sip, if he wished to experience any of the more pleasant effects of drinking alcohol.

When he lifted the bottle to his lips and tipped it back, there was a moment when Elrond regretted that resolution. There was a _moment_ when he wanted nothing more than to spit the wine out and cast the bottle aside.

The flavor of the wine was…

“Only suffered a _little_ bit?” Elrond spluttered, struggling not to gag as he forced himself to set the bottle down on the floor without deliberately tossing it or smashing it.

Celebrimbor shrugged. “As I said, to me, wine is wine. It all tastes very much the same.”

“Wine might be wine, but _that_ was barely wine at all anymore!” Elrond took a swig of water from his waterskin, desperately trying to wash the taste out of his mouth. It had been horrifically bitter, so bitter that if there had ever been any taste of grapes or whatever other fruit the wine might have been derived from, it certainly wasn’t present anymore, not in any amounts great enough to actually be tasted over the screaming, borderline-nauseating bitterness that now dominated the wine. It was almost foul, though not in a way that Elrond had ever expected alcohol to be foul.

It was… There was a metaphor here, somewhere. Elrond was pretty certain he did not want to dwell upon it too long. It sounded like a good way to be struck so powerfully with the urge to smash the bottle that he might not have been able to help himself.

Another shrug. “It did not taste all that much more bitter than what I am accustomed to.”

“You’ve either been drinking absolute swill, or there is something _profoundly_ wrong with your tongue.”

At that, Celebrimbor tilted his head forward slightly, peering intently into Elrond’s face, and said, lowly, “There’s nothing wrong with my tongue, Elrond.” His eyes were darting, something close to panic shining within, though there was something else sparking there as well, something hardly any less frenetic. Voice strained, a spate of giddy laughter peppering his words, “I can demonstrate, if you require.”

Doing just that, without stopping for any consideration just as time or place or the fact that they were sitting drinking something that could barely be called wine in somebody else’s cellar and there were perhaps better times _and_ places for it, that held an appeal. Doing just that held a strong enough appeal that Elrond had to suck in a deep breath and remind himself once more of just what it was he had followed Celebrimbor down here for in the first place. _Later_ , if they were both still amenable. Later, he thought regretfully, and not now.

Elrond did not know if he would still be amenable later. He did not know if perhaps he would not have convinced himself that it was a bad idea, if perhaps he would not have convinced himself to retreat, if he would have given such voice to fear that he would manage to convince himself that he had imagined all of it, that he had never wanted anything. He wished he could say that he knew he would not do these things, that he would still feel the same way later. But he knew himself as well, and he knew what he shrank from. He wanted to be _seen_ , yes. But the want was always accompanied by dread. It made entirely too much sense that this would be, as well.

“Why…” It was a struggle to make his voice sound normal, and even when he managed something that came at least halfway, it still sounded brittle to his own ears. “Why don’t you tell me about that book, first, as you promised.”

There came a moment of silence in which Celebrimbor was frozen in his earlier expression, though his eyes had widened and there was no mistaking the panic shining within them now. Then, his whole demeanor changed. He shrank back, folding his arms across his chest, back bent and legs folded close to himself. His brow creased, lips wobbling as if holding back a sob or a scream. Elrond had the impression of a hurt child, no, not just that, but the impression of a hurt child who didn’t understand what it was that they had done to deserve the pain and didn’t rightly think that they _had_ done anything to deserve it at all.

In the face of such an expression, in the face of Celebrimbor looking at him as if he had asked for him to cut out his own heart, or some other internal organ if it pleased him to think of something that might have been more painful, Elrond wavered. If only for a moment, he wavered, and in that moment it seemed far more natural to set his hands on Celebrimbor’s shoulders and say to him that he did not have to tell, not if he really thought it would cause him so much pain. An apology curled on his tongue, which might be the strangest thing of all, for whatever it was that had caused such a reaction, it was not _Elrond,_ now was it?

But curiosity still drove him, and drove him too hard to be gainsaid. He had been promised. He had had enough of talking around the issue. The answer was there, just waiting to be brought into the light and into the air, and if Elrond could just find the right levers to press on…

And he, who had survived the pain of similar revelations (or so he thought), rather thought that Celebrimbor would survive this as well. Elrond did not quash his sympathy, for he remembered from all of the interviews he had conducted the consequences of driving subjects too hard, but he shrank it, shrank it to the point that he could hear its voice only faintly, and stared at Celebrimbor evenly.

“Do…” Celebrimbor’s voice was horribly small. “Do I _have_ to?” And now he seemed only more like a hurt child.

Bringing the information to light would drag him back to the present. _Has it ever worked that way for_ you _? Has it ever worked that way for you, or has it just dragged you deeper into the past?_ It would, it _would_.

Elrond breathed sharply through his nose. “There aren’t a great many things that I would say we ever _have_ to do. But we do them anyways, because our life will become considerably less comfortable for us if we don’t.”

Celebrimbor laughed shakily. “Was that supposed to be some kind of _threat_?” And the joking note in his voice was almost macabre for how much the tremor of it sounded like a sob instead.

“ _No_ , Celebrimbor, I was just…” But he was getting off track, and he thought that that might have been the point. Elrond glared at him, while trying to shove down a dull ember of respect—he did know which of _Elrond’s_ levers were to be pressed, it seemed—and went on, deliberately calmly, “It was just an example. There are few things that we really have to do. We do them anyways. You don’t _have_ to tell me, but you did _say_ that you would. I… I do not think that I would have followed you here, otherwise.” And he could only hope that Celebrimbor would not spot the lie.

But as the moments dragged on, Celebrimbor alternating between staring at his hands and, eyes darting to and fro, looking all over Elrond’s face, Elrond thought that even if Celebrimbor did not hear the lie in his voice, he might be able to make out the lie in his face, if not his entire body. _I have a problem_ , he thought miserably. _I do certainly have a problem._

It did not have to be a problem. For others, it perhaps would not have been a problem even for a moment.

_Why do I think of this as a problem?_

Why did the prospect of being seen, truly seen, feel to him like it carried the same risk as flaying?

Elrond had a feeling that the lie wasn’t all that Celebrimbor would be reading in his body, if he did not stop this train of thought now. He could not make it cease entirely, but he forced them to quiet, as much as he could, and waited for Celebrimbor’s response.

After another long few moments, Celebrimbor drew a long, shuddering breath. Staring studiously at the ground, he nodded his head, and after flexing his hand, reached forward and took another swig of the barely-wine; Elrond wrinkled his nose, but refrained from making comment, fearing to break Celebrimbor’s concentration and having to start all over again. The idea of chasing the answers around in circles for hours on end, possibly without ever getting any answer out of it at all, was maddening.

Another sharp, short nod, and Celebrimbor was looking into Elrond’s face. Considering his expression, Elrond rather wished he wasn’t. “What if I told you that, at some point in the past, my father and certain of my uncles attempted to recreate some of my grandfather’s work?”

There was… There was something in the distant recesses of Elrond’s mind, screaming. The tone of Celebrimbor’s voice might well have put it there, for there was nothing there that would have been appropriate to the light of the present day, nothing there that would have been fitting to the well-lit rooms and airy walkways of Lindon. He tried to tell himself that it wasn’t screaming, and when that was no longer practical, he told himself more firmly that he did not know what it was, nor the reason why. “I…” He groped for words, feeling a little like he was groping for breath as well. “…I would say that that is not entirely surprising. All of us know Fëanor’s reputation. There were many things that he made that I have no doubt would have been of great use to the Exiles.”

“Fëanor’s reputation…” Celebrimbor rolled the words on his tongue as if he was entertaining something foul. His eyes glittered with bitterness—no longer confined to his mouth, it would seem—and he shook his head jerkily, so much so that as Elrond watched, he expected to hear the squeals of rusty hinges. “Yes, I know all about Fëanor’s reputation,” he murmured. His left hand went briefly to his throat, groping at skin as if he expected to find something there that was not skin at all. “Fëanor’s reputation casts quite an impressive shadow. I never have been able to find the edges of it.” Another deep breath, that did not sound at all like it was filling his lungs as it ought. “But that is not what I wished to tell you, and that is not what you wished to hear.

“Yes, my father and some of my uncles attempted to recreate my grandfather’s work many times. Much was lost in the battle that claimed Fëanor’s life. Still more was lost on the voyage here, and for some…” He passed a hand over his face, hacked out another bitter laugh. “…For some, there was never very many notes to go on in the first place.”

The screaming had gotten a little louder. It was grown also a little harder to ignore.

Celebrimbor fixed Elrond in a hard, piercing stare. “Elrond. What if I told you that my father and some of my uncles attempted in the First Age to recreate the Silmarils?”

And now, the screaming was grown so loud that Elrond expected to hear it railing behind his closed mouth, expected to feel it oozing blisteringly hot from his skin. “What?” Not a scream, little more than a hoarse croak, a voice that he barely recognized as his own. “But that’s—“

“Mad?” Celebrimbor’s voice was not readily recognizable, either, but instead of hoarse, it had grown hard as steel, and just about as yielding. His mouth curled in something close to a snarl, but there, Elrond could see some crack in the façade, for as he watched Celebrimbor’s lips curl further back, the more apparent became the tremble in those same lips. “Given the reputation of my house, I would have thought you would expect something like that.”

The misery that weighed his voice down on those last few syllables was impossible to ignore, but Elrond did not respond to it, not yet. It was hard to respond to anything that was not the desperate urge to flee when he felt like the floor was collapsing under his feet. It was harder still to form anything intelligible when all that wanted to come out of his mouth was a garbled, broken mess of noise, but eventually he managed, “But how were they even going to _do_ that?! No one even knows what the Silmarils were _made_ of!”

Celebrimbor waved his hand, before it finally settled on his brow, fingertips pressing hard into skin. “As I said, _mad._ It was my father’s idea to start with, and I do not think he had gotten much sleep for the past several nights before he first proposed it. But once he proposed it, he held onto it for years, and he managed to rope nearly all of my uncles into the enterprise as well.”

Elrond did not ask if ‘nearly all’ included Maglor and Maedhros. He did not think he could have stood the answer, either way.

As it was, he was eyeing the wine bottle, which was becoming increasingly attractive to him in spite of the revolting taste of what he could only call wine if he stretched the definition by about a mile and allowed for the possibility that _wine bottles_ could have ghosts, as well as Edhil and, however briefly, Men, as well. Another scream was boiling in Elrond’s chest, though the emotion was considerably different than that of the crawling dread of anticipation that had been birthed in his mind just a few minutes prior.

Elrond tried his best to deaden his tongue, and reached for the wine bottle. _Ugh_ , the wine tasted, if possible, even fouler on second taste than it had on the first, but the alcohol within the wine was still potent, and with this second, much longer gulp, he could feel his blood begin to buzz with it. Whether or not it would be enough to steady him was questionable at best, but perhaps if he could drink enough, it would no longer matter that he was feeling about as steady as a birch tree clinging to the tip of a cliff in the middle of a thunderstorm and an earthquake. Perhaps. Somehow, Elrond did not think there was enough wine in this entire cellar for that. More likely, once he had drank himself to death and was waiting for the indescribable and unmistakable call of the Doomsman of the Rodyn to lure his spirit away from the site of his now cooling corpse, his newly houseless spirit would be feeling the unease all the more keenly for no longer having flesh to insulate it from his heart.

Still, the idea that he could drink away his unsteadiness was appealing, even if he was yet sober enough to know how unlikely it was. Elrond drank deep, only stopping when Celebrimbor finally made a noise which Elrond took to be discontentment with the idea of having to get up and get another bottle.

Uncertain as he was of the wisdom of this course, Elrond caught Celebrimbor’s gaze and asked, grimacing as the words curdled on his lips, “And what was it that finally stopped them?”

Not… Not any sudden influx of _sense_ , Elrond imagined. No, _no_ , that would not have been at all likely, now would it? That would have required them to be able to put aside their obsession and their void-bound Oath long enough to actually acknowledge what was likely only to hurt them, what was likely only to wound them and everyone around them, whether they cared for them, hated them, or were totally indifferent to them. To set aside a quest to recreate the process Fëanor had used to create the Silmarils, if there was even the slightest possibility that something like that could be done? No, _no_ , Elrond could not imagine such a quest ever being set aside willingly. No matter who asked it of them.

His hand—both his hands, actually, which Elrond thought should say something, even if he wasn’t sure what that something was—itched for the bottle. Elrond kept it in his lap, if only with the sort of difficulty he’d had in keeping from reaching for Elros in the last moment they had had when they lived in a world where they truly understood each other.

Celebrimbor pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and his forefinger, screwing his eyes shut. “You said it yourself; no one knows what the Silmarils are made of. There can be some guess that adamant was one of the materials used to fashion the silima, but I wouldn’t… wouldn’t hazard a guess as to the other ingredients, not in ten thousand years—and even if someone was to recreate the list of materials used in the casing, the proportions and ratios, and how they were mixed together, there would still be the matter of recreating the _light_. My father and Caranthir were able to create many solutions that would have been as hard as steel, but none were equal to silima. None were hard enough that only their maker would have known the secret of breaking them. So the project was abandoned after a time, with much frustration and snapping and gnashing of teeth. But that’s not the point.” Celebrimbor’s voice rose in volume, while rising also in pitch, high and tinny and trembling, so hard and now so brittle that it seemed as if anything could have broken it, as if the lightest touch could have shattered it. “That’s…” He drew a hissing breath through clenched teeth. “That’s not the point. That is _not_ the point. They… they abandoned the project, and I…”

Perhaps Celebrimbor would have denied that the sudden choking in his voice sounded like a sob, if asked, but Elrond would not have believed him. Celebrimbor swallowed hard, nodding once again. He’d been nodding so many times this evening that Elrond began to wonder if he wasn’t trying to reassure himself of what he was saying, more than he was trying to assure Elrond of the veracity of any word leaving his mouth. The thought made something ache inside of Elrond’s chest, like a slightly blunted thorn driving slowly, but surely, into his heart. But the thorn did not come from anything to do with Celebrimbor. He swallowed hard himself, trying to banish it or even just ignore it, but he could not. He had never been able to. The thorn came from inside of him. It was something of him, and there was nothing he could do to separate it from him, short of cutting out his own heart.

“I… I knew they had not abandoned the project because they were convinced of the folly of it. I did not dare to think that they had abandoned the project because perhaps they had set aside their longing for the Silmarils.” Now, Elrond suspected that even Celebrimbor would not have tried to deny that that was a sob curdling at the edges of his voice. Celebrimbor’s breathing grew increasingly uneven as the silent moments dragged on, increasingly ragged, increasingly wet. When he sucked in another deep, _deep_ breath, his entire body trembled, as if assailed by bitter wind. “That would have been… That would have just been setting myself up for disappointment.” His head drooped on his neck, lolling towards his shoulders, like a flower cut from its plant, and left too long in the sun without water, or perhaps more appropriately like—No, _no_ , Elrond would not make such a comparison. “I knew what was in their hearts, and I did not dare consider that they might have set the idea of recreating the Silmarils aside for any reason other than because they had finally been forced to confront the impossibility of such a task. But I thought…” Another long, shuddering, ragged, wet breath. “…I really did think that once they had realized that it was impossible for them, they might put the idea to bed for good. But the book…” For a moment, his eyes were hot with anger, as fiery as Maedhros’s had ever been when locked in something verging on rage. But then the anger evaporated, his eyes dulled until they were less the eyes of the Lechind and more the flat, smooth pebbles Elrond would find on the banks of the Lhûn, if he cared to walk those banks and have the song of the Sea, that song that was not for him and might never be for him, filling his ears while Elrond told himself that he heard no song but that, heard no voice but the unknowable voice of the Sea. “But the book is still _here_. They _kept_ it, after all of _that_ …”

Elrond dug his fingers into the fabric of his trousers. “You saw what they did to the pages.” Whichever one of them had done that to the pages. Or maybe it hadn’t been one of them after all. Perhaps it had been an associate. Perhaps it had been Maglor’s now-dead wife, Ilmanis, or Gildis, as she should have been called in Sindarin. Or perhaps it really had been Celebrimbor who had taken a pen to the book with as much violence as a murderer would take a dagger to their victim. Now that he knew more of what had once lied beneath all of that ink, Elrond had a harder time blaming him for it. “It would be difficult to make out much of anything beneath all of those slash marks.”

Celebrimbor laughed hollowly. “That would mean little to Celegorm, or Amrod or Amras, for that matter. Any of them would have been able to recreate the book, even if they were no students of alchemy themselves. That the book was left here, intact, is all the proof _I_ need that the project was never truly abandoned, as I had thought. I…” Celebrimbor struck his hand against the hard earth, pressing his mouth tight together, but not tight enough to suppress the trembling that threatened to break into open tears. He met Elrond’s gaze for the first time in what felt like an eternity, and though there were no tears shining in his eyes— _not yet_ , whispered a voice out of the back of Elrond’s mind—after a moment, Elrond had to look away. To stare too long into Celebrimbor’s eyes felt like doing violence to an already very fragile man. “I don’t know why I’m surprised,” Celebrimbor muttered, and folded in on himself, holding his knees close to his chest and pressing the side of his face against his knees. “I really don’t.”

There were many things that Elrond should have said to that. He could think of a few of them, could even count on himself to draw a few out of his mouth. Some of them, he even _wanted_ to pull out, if only because the words would have been said to console himself as much as to console Celebrimbor—and he could, if he was honest with himself, admit that there was more there than just the desire to console himself.

None of them came. They had tangled around Elrond’s heart like chains. Each of them led back to the past, led back to a time when he had thought to himself the same thing—each time he was surprised, and didn’t know why he should be, each time he was _hoping_ to be surprised, and then wasn’t. He didn’t want… He did not want…

And yet, there was another impulse arising inside of him, something he had always been half-aware of, but had never before indulged. He had always feared that if he indulged it overmuch, he would not be able to stop. There had been a part of him that feared that if he indulged it overmuch, if he could not stop, it would simply go on until it had consumed him and there was nothing of him left but the bitterness that had birthed the impulse in the first place.

He had always wondered if Celebrimbor was looking at him and seeking a mirror for whatever bitterness he might feel. Elrond had now only confirmed for himself what he had already known: there was plenty of bitterness here to form a mirror.

But it was just that he could hear the question in Celebrimbor’s voice, and it was the same question Elrond had been asking himself nearly every day since he and Elros had been left behind in Lindon, while Maglor and Maedhros snuck off towards the last in a long, _long_ line of disastrous misadventures that seemed at some point to have become their entire lives, and now that Elrond had heard the question echoed in another’s voice, he could not stop it from rattling in his own mind. He sucked in a deep breath, but it was not enough to put air in his lungs, not enough to banish that question from his mind.

Too much wine.

Or not enough, perhaps.

Most likely too much.

Elrond took another gulp anyways. It did not help.

Celebrimbor had had the same idea, for he slipped his hand around the neck of the bottle the moment Elrond set it back down on the floor, and drew a long enough draught that by the time he was done, the bottle was only half-empty. It… it did not seem to be affecting him in the slightest. Elrond had no idea what that might mean. He was not certain he wanted to find out.

“It was always the Oath, in the end,” Celebrimbor said matter-of-factly. He straightened up, sitting cross-legged once more. There was some brittle dignity in him, but Elrond could see it crumbling. “It was always their Oath, and their Silmarils. It was more important than everything.” He looked away, rubbing at his arm, jaw working, eyes bright now with the tears that had been promised. “Than everyone.”

Elrond’s temper flared inside of him like a fire stoked by a poker soaked in oil. “Do not speak to me of such things,” he hissed. His heart was rattling in his chest, beating against his ribs like a prisoner battering against the bars of its cage. “Do not speak to me like I am a stranger to it, like I do not _know_ what their Oath was to them. I saw what it was to them. All-important, all-consuming. I _saw_ , Celebrimbor. Do not speak of it to me.”

It was… That was the first time, he thought. He had never spoken of it so openly with Celebrimbor before, had always avoided the subject as best he could, and yet the words had slipped from his mouth like water. Elrond choked back a giddy, almost terrified laugh. It had been the easiest thing in the world. What else might he say? What else might he _do_?

And the moment had not gone unmarked by Celebrimbor. He nodded to himself, more gently than he had since first entering the wine cellar, his gaze sharpening as he looked Elrond over. “Of course,” he said softly, sadly, and Elrond could not decide whether the desire to rake that sadness out of Celebrimbor’s body and stamp it into nothingness in the dirt, or wrap it around himself like a cloak, like a blanket on his bed, was the stronger desire within him. “You were there at the end. Well…” His mouth twisted downward in something that was too miserable to be a grimace. “…Not at the absolute end. _I_ was there for that.”

He needed to stop Celebrimbor talking. He _needed_ to stop Celebrimbor from saying anything more. He could not bear it, could not stand to think of what he would reveal to him— _I know, I know, I know, I already know_ , but to hear it without the insulating buffer of scorn and disgust would have been the same as taking a knife to his composure, taking a knife to his _heart_ , and what would be left of him when that was done, what would be left of him to walk away from this place and try to carry on with the life he had forged without them? Would there be anything left at all?

He had loved them both. There was no use denying what was so obviously true, even if there were many at court who could not understand how Elrond could _possibly_ have loved them. He had loved them both, but they both left such devastation in their wakes, and loving them did not inure Elrond to the wounds that devastation inflicted. Loving them only made the devastation feel like something which ought to be fatal. Loving them made Elrond wonder each time how he had ever survived grappling with what they had done.

Celebrimbor asked himself the same questions, no doubt.

Elrond could not stop Celebrimbor talking. He could not even tear his gaze away from Celebrimbor’s face.

Celebrimbor tried to smile, and the only mercy was that after a few moments of attempting to arrange the broken pieces into something suitable, he _stopped_. “I was in the camp that night, you know? When Finarfin first landed, he looked for Galadriel first. That was only right, that was what we all expected. But then he took one look at me, and decided he needed to keep me where he could see me. I never could decide whether this was done out of concern for my well-being—I think Galadriel may have told him the story about the stabbing—or if he was afraid I would prove myself as mad as the rest of my close kin and get myself killed, and possibly drag others down with me. But I stayed close to both of the kings of the Ñoldor throughout the war, and thus, I saw much that others have heard of only through tales.

“I was there, that night.” His voice dropped down almost to a whisper, as toneless as an autumn breeze heralding winter. “I was there, that last, terrible night. I watched. They never acknowledged me. I’m not certain they even _saw_ me. But I saw _them_ , and—“

Finally, he could take no more of this self-flagellation, and broke off. Celebrimbor shut his eyes, sucking in several deep, gasping breaths through his mouth, several deep, rapid breaths through his nose. He reached for the bottle once more, but when he set his hand upon the dusty glass of the neck, he paused, fingers curled loosely around the glass. After a few moments, Celebrimbor seemed to think better of it, and drew his hand away.

“But that was only a single night.” There was something terrible, in the way he had been able to beat his voice even so well. It bespoke long practice, long use, long _need_. “I saw them after it was all over, at the end, when even they must have known that what drove them was not any desire to avenge their father and restore his work to what the law would have considered their right owners—they must have known at last, at the end, the true nature of the thing they had bound themselves to, when they swore that Oath. But you…” Celebrimbor tried again to smile, but only for a moment. “You got to witness the final _descent_. The long failure over years and decades to make some sort of life that was not in thrall to blood and grief and _Void_. That must have been…”

“No.” A whisper only, at the first, but Elrond could feel the scream rising up inside of him, ready to make up for the lack of breath at the first. He shook his head choppily, resisting the urge to fold in on himself and _cry_. “No.”

“No,” Celebrimbor repeated, ever so softly. He regarded Elrond for a long moment, nursing a terribly gentle expression on his face. He reached, but only his fingertips ever brushed against Elrond’s arm, and he drew his arm back as if he had touched something he ought not, touched something that could break if he handled it without the utmost care. The touch burned, and Elrond wished for renewal, but Celebrimbor seemed more worried about _breaking_ than _comforting_. “No, you never really wish to speak of it, do you? Were you… Were you afraid that I might be looking for something to judge in your responses? Were you afraid of being judged, and found wanting?”

Elrond said nothing. Elrond did not think he could have spoken, except to scream.

Celebrimbor laughed hollowly, brokenly. “ _I_ have certainly feared that. _I_ have learned over the years that there is nothing I can say as regards to them that someone in my vicinity will not find wanting somehow. If I profess love and grief, they are disgusted. If I profess condemnation of their actions, they are suspicious of my truthfulness, or else think me unnatural for being able to cast aside my own kin so quickly. And always, _always_ , there is that hitch in their trust, that moment of wondering whether or not I am any different from them, whether I am myself or if I am just the shadow they cast behind them. Quickly enough did I learn it better to keep my silence, though even in my silence did some find things worthy of condemnation. No, there was nothing I could say that would make everyone happy.”

Elrond raked his hand against the floor, wishing for the ability to dig furrows into the earth, but this flood had been entirely too well-made for such things, and past the dust, there was nothing that would yield to him.

_You may speak of them, if such is your desire. You may speak of them in whatever tone you wish. I hardly expect you to put all thought of them from your minds. It would only be natural to wish for them…_

Such had been said to him and to Elros, once. Once, they had been afforded the understanding that it was cruel to expect them to forget, especially with circumstances being what they were. Not _now_ , of course. Those words had not been said to him in this Second Age of Anor. It would be much easier for him if they had been.

But how _much_ easier, really? The words were tangled around Elrond’s heart in thorny chains that snagged together and refused to come loose. Even if he had freedom, even if he found that the words could flow from his mouth like water, as they had done just now, would he? Would he take that opportunity?

Forget the prospect of being seen against his will. That was bad enough, but this, the idea of exposing himself to the world at large, every last gory, ugly, bleeding vein of himself, and watching as the whole world turned its back, as they surely must once they had derived all the entertainment they could from such a grotesque spectacle and remembered to be repelled once more, that was—No. Just no. Even if he had the opportunity and the freedom to speak of it to whomever he pleased, even if he did not have to worry over how it would affect his prospects in Lindon, Elrond thought he would have held his tongue. Only those who were willing to see him without turning their backs in disgust once they were done with the spectacle, only they would see Elrond’s heart.

That, and Elrond was afraid that if he started talking about it, he wouldn’t be able to stop, not until he drowned in his own words. That was not a minor consideration.

It looked as if Celebrimbor was looking for someone to whom he could show his heart, as well. The thought of it put so many disparate emotions into Elrond’s heart that it made him feel a little queasy. He had to fight to keep his itching hands where they were.

“But people aren’t waiting for you to surprise them, are they?” And now the conversation, if a conversation was really what it could be called, had come back around to Elrond. Elrond squirmed under Celebrimbor’s scrutiny, but Celebrimbor only gestured at him, going on, “Everyone in Lindon assumes that they know exactly what it is you feel about it. About _them_. I do not think I have ever heard them ask you about it.”

Elrond shrugged stiffly. “What is there to ask?” He’d not been trying very hard to keep the bitterness out of his voice. The way his voice wound up sounding, you would think that he had not been trying at all. “It seems that everyone knows everything there is to know about me.”

Celebrimbor’s laugh was more than a match in bitterness for Elrond’s voice. “And to most of them, I am a mystery whose solutions they are guaranteed to dislike. Two different approaches, and yet the result is the same: our voices, stifled. Our perceptions, disregarded. No one wants to listen.”

Suddenly, Celebrimbor’s hand shot forward. This time, there was no hesitation, no behavior as if worrying over fragility. He set his hand firmly down upon Elrond’s arm; though there was little force to it, remarkably gentle even after Elrond had had time to grow accustomed to it, his touch yet burned. Celebrimbor stared intently into Elrond’s face, something close to desperation sparking in his eyes. “I do not pretend to know just what it is you feel regarding my uncles,” he said lowly, almost urgently. “You could tell me that you loved them or hated them or entertained both at the same time, and it would not surprise me. Anything seems justifiable, after how they got you and how they kept you.” His face screwed up as if speaking such caused him pain, but when he spoke, his voice was clear: “if you tell me that you wish nothing to do with any of Fëanor’s blood, then that does not surprise me, either. Once we return to Lindon, I will consider our acquaintance severed.

“But I have seen you.”

Later, Elrond would wonder if Celebrimbor had understood the significance of those words to him. For now, he could scarcely think at all; his mind barely worked well enough in the wake of such words even to _listen_.

“I have seen you, Elrond.” Celebrimbor offered a lopsided smile, but there was little joy in it, much uncertainty, and no light. “I have seen someone else grappling with the weight of a legacy larger than him, and I have wondered if he has ever felt it too great a weight to bear.” His smile tilted from uncertainty into gentle, tired sympathy. “I have wondered if he ever resents the expectations placed upon him. I have wondered if he ever feels lonely, with that legacy as his closest companion, with so few living kin to show for it. If you ever need my ear, if you ever need my, my _shoulder_ , I—“

It was at that point that Elrond finally just grabbed him.

Celebrimbor’s lips tasted like the sour, disgusting centuries-old wine they had been drinking in an abortive attempt to banish thoughts of Silmarils from their minds. The taste clung stubbornly to his skin, as stubborn as blood or ash when it had been floating down from the sky for days on end and there was no river or stream or pond or even _bucket_ to bathe the skin clean in, and Elrond had known such blood, known such ash. He knew. He just knew.

There was quite a lot of poetry devoted to the pleasures of kissing or engaging in rather more passionate activities with a romantic partner. Elrond _had_ read some of that poetry, both in the days when he had very little alternative in terms of reading material, and later, when he had had considerably more reading material to choose from, but had felt the desire to go back to something that stirred in him the same emotions as he had felt during the rare quiet and truly content moments in his childhood and adolescence. He’d always gotten the impression that kissing someone was supposed to feel rather different than this. Perhaps it was the pain in his hand that put everything off-kilter. Elrond gripped Celebrimbor’s shoulders tightly with both hands, white-hot sparks of pain shooting up his arm from his right hand. But it was not enough to make him stop.

It felt…

It felt like cutting his heart open and letting it bleed. It felt like raking his teeth against the embers of the fire that had swallowed the Ard-galen whole. It felt _right_.

“Oh,” Celebrimbor said when Elrond drew back for air, sounding slightly concussed.

Not so concussed that he couldn’t slip a hand to the back of Elrond’s neck, and the other to the center of his back. Elrond could not tell if he was trying to steady him, or just trying to keep him from drawing back. The distinction mattered little to Elrond. Either one felt like an encouraging sign.

“Oh, shut up,” Elrond told him, already drawing closer once more.

Celebrimbor obliged him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Anor** —the Sindarin name for the Sun  
>  **Edhil** —Elves (singular: Edhel) (Sindarin)  
>  **Ennor** —Middle-Earth (Sindarin)  
>  **Lechind** —'Flame-eyed'; a name given to the Ñoldor by the Sindar, referring to the light of the Trees that shined in the eyes of those Ñoldor born in Aman during the Years of the Trees (singular: Lachend) (Sindarin)  
>  **Rodyn** —Valar (singular: Rodon) (Sindarin): a common Sindarin name for the Valar


	22. Chapter Twenty-Two

Elrond woke the next morning slightly stiff, though considering that he had slept the last night with part of his body lying against the ground, and part of it on top of Celebrimbor’s body, head against shoulder, he supposed, once he was awake enough to suppose anything, that all in all, he had gotten off rather lightly. Also, he was spitting hair out of his mouth. Elrond rolled his eyes, and supposed he’d gotten off lightly not to find himself choking on Celebrimbor’s deceptively thick hair.

In the end, affairs last night had ended rather abruptly. High above in the rainy sky, a sudden crack of thunder had come, so loud and so tremendous that the wine bottles still in the racks of the wine cellar rattled and clanged as if beaten upon with spoons. That brought the outside world back into sharp focus.

_“We should…” Celebrimbor paused a moment, licking his lips, visibly torn. He lifted the hand he had braced on the back of Elrond’s neck, running it through long, loose, slightly tangled dark hair. “We should probably return to the auxiliary kitchens. We’ll want to be well-rested tomorrow morning, if we don’t want to take a wrong step in the hill.”_

_Elrond’s first impulse was to refuse, impatience protesting so loudly within his mind that he was surprised not to see the wine bottles shaking with the force of those protests as well, along with the next roll of thunder to crash far overhead. This had been… This had been something he did not particularly wish to cease, not when it would be so easy just to keep going…_

_But Celebrimbor spoke sense, however little Elrond might like it. The next day, they would be making their way through lightless caverns with only Celebrimbor’s lamp to guide them, through lightless passageways with holes in the ground through which they could easily fall to their deaths, even if they were decently careful. It would not do to spend the whole or even most of the night in pursuits other than sleeping._

_With a sigh, “Fine._ Fine _. Lead the way.”_

As was typical of a windowless kitchen that was lit only by a lamp and whose passageways leading in and out were far enough from the surface that no light would have been able to reach all the way here, even if all of the doors had not been shut, Elrond had no idea if it was morning. He had no idea how long it had been sleeping, and it was frankly tempting to just shut his eyes and go back to sleep. Celebrimbor was a heat sink, giving off enough warmth that within moments, Elrond was lulled nearly all the way back to sleep. But there was something inside of him that was fully awake, and soon enough, it spread to the rest of his body. However appealing the idea of just going back to sleep might have been, Elrond just couldn’t. For better or worse, he was awake.

His dreams had been…

Do you know, Elrond actually could not remember whether or not he had dreamed, let alone what his dreams had entailed? He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept on the ground, and not been able to remember even one detail of the bizarre and vivid dreams he endured while sleeping with his body against the earth. Perhaps that was a consequence of sleeping with only the lower half of his body against the unyielding earth. He might still have had the dreams, and yet been completely insensible to them.

That was quite a nice thought, actually. Elrond would have to remember it when they were back on the road south from the port to the capital. As for right now, it was reason enough not to move from where he was, on the off-chance that Elrond might actually fall asleep once more, despite his confidence that he was awake for good, for the rest of the day, even if it was not properly day yet.

But that was not the only reason. Elrond was honest with himself to admit that, not that it felt like much of an imposition to admit to it now. He’d not slept in such close quarters with another since he and Elros were so young as to regard sleeping in a pile as not only a necessity for keeping warm on cold winter nights, but as something that they enjoyed, rather than something that they regarded ambivalently at best thanks to the great potential to wake up with an elbow digging into the ribs or somewhere considerably more sensitive than that. This was… This was not that. This was something considerably different, even accounting for the superficial resemblance, but though there was something precarious about it, Elrond could hardly deny that he found it pleasant to lie flesh against flesh, even with clothing acting as buffer. It felt…

He did not know just what it felt. He knew that he did not wish for it to end.

Of course, it had to end. All things ended eventually, even the seemingly endless lives of the Edhil—if grief or injury did not find them and put an end to them, then eventually the world would be broken, and there was no telling what would become of the Edhil after the world was broken and it was remade as it should have been, before Morgoth interfered with the designs. Compared to all of that, this was something infinitely more fragile and short-lived.

Celebrimbor stirred beneath him, and Elrond drew a quiet, regretful breath. Here it was, the moment of ending. Less calamitous by far than other moments of ending he had known, but he begrudged it, all the same.

There was nothing to do but let it happen.

“Are you awake?” Celebrimbor murmured, mouth somewhere close to Elrond’s ear, though Elrond had not stopped to look to see just how close, and he had no intention of risking straining his neck doing so.

Elrond bit back a sigh. “Yes.”

He felt a large hand run a slow track across his back, finally stopping between his shoulder blades. “I think it’s close to morning.”

Still wanting to cling to the warmth and security of the moment, even if he knew it must end, Elrond frowned and asked him, “How can you tell? There’s no way sunlight could ever reach down here.”

“Hmm. I’ve always known. Not when it’s close to night, I mean.” His voice was still thick with sleep, and yet he was talking like they ought to get up. The unfairness of it prickled beneath Elrond’s skin. “But when it’s close to morning? Always. We should get up soon. It will take time to return to the cave; we do not want the ship to leave us behind here.”

No, they didn’t, did they? Celebrimbor was pleasant company, but they could not go months or years with only each other for company, even if the matter of food did not become urgent long before then. Just Elrond, Celebrimbor, and all of the ghosts that came out at night to haunt the town. Just the two of them, the visible ghosts that haunted the town at night, and the invisible, intangible ghosts that suffused every stone of the castle itself.

This was not a place for anything living. Even the seabirds did not congregate here. Edhil ought not try to make their lives here, in this outpost of a land that belonged to and was ruled only by the dead.

Elrond did not bother biting back his sigh this time, rolling off of him with a huff. “Very well, then. And if it turns out that your sense of time is off and it’s still several hours away from dawn, I reserve the right to never trust that you know what time of day it is, ever again.”

Celebrimbor huffed out a laugh. “You make such interesting threats, Elrond,” he said wryly. “They never cease to entertain.”

Elrond doubted that very much. He did not challenge him on it.

They both sat up, and then sat in silence for several moments. Elrond pressed the fingers of his left hand into his right, wincing as he struggled to knead the soreness—considerably lessened from the night before, but still present, and likely to still be present tomorrow as well—from his hand. The pain was, as he had reflected, lessening in earnest now, but the fact that it was still present at all irked him. He could not guess if he would be able to write properly again by the time they returned to the capital. There was every possibility that the pain would just stay at the levels it occupied now, not so bad that it drew Elrond’s attention every waking moment and disrupted his ability to sleep, but bad enough that he could not try to write with it without stoking the pain to greater heights. Elrond did not look forward to that. He looked forward to explaining it to Gil-galad even less; he could hear the lecture on recklessness even now.

Celebrimbor pressed his fingertips lightly against the back of Elrond’s hand—his left, not his right. “How is your hand?” he asked softly.

“Sore,” Elrond replied shortly. “I imagine it will be for some time.”

“Not so sore as to impede your concentration, is it?”

“No, not so sore as all that. Just…” Elrond hissed between gritted teeth. “Just sore. I’ll be fine in the hill, so long as there are no complications on your end.”

“No fear of that.”

Silence fell between them again, this silence charged with the uncertainty painted on Celebrimbor’s face. The longer it went on, the longer Celebrimbor stared at Elrond as if he could not decide what to make of him or what he should say to him or… The longer that went on, the more Elrond could feel his impatience and discomfort crackling in the back of his throat. He should not snap, he knew. He should not glare or frown too deeply or demand an explanation, not when all Celebrimbor was doing was looking, and not even with the intentness that so often heralded someone trying to peer into the mind of another.

Should not, should not, should not. There were always so many things that Elrond _should not_ , and part of that was just part of being an adult, he knew, he knew that an adult had so many more restrictions upon them than a child, the freedoms that came with being an adult unequal to the freedoms that were lost once childhood was left so far behind, never to return again. Part of it was just part of leaving childhood behind, but more of it came from the sort of life that Elrond had led. So much more of his life had been dictated by ‘should not, should not, should not,’ rather than ‘what if I, what if I, what if I.’

Well, what if he did ask? What might that do?

“What is it?” Elrond asked him, and surprised himself by how even his voice sounded on the syllables, even if it was still weighted down with sleep.

Celebrimbor shifted his weight uncomfortably, suddenly averting his gaze. From that, Elrond thought he knew what had been going through Celebrimbor’s mind. His stomach began to churn, a feeling not at all helped when Celebrimbor bore out his suspicions with words of his own.

“About last night…”

Elrond bristled in spite of himself. He tried to soothe the suddenly sore muscles of his shoulders back down into a relaxed state, could not quite manage it. “If you’re going to try to _apologize_ to me, I would ask you to remember that _I_ was the one who made the first move there, _not_ you. _I_ have no intention of apologizing for any of it.”

That last bit was out of his mouth before he really contemplated what it meant, especially if Celebrimbor had found some reason to regret it himself, or if he’d not been acting according to his own desires and had just been going along with what was happening. No, Elrond did not particularly want to believe that—who would—but if that turned out to be the case… His stomach twisted, both in loss and in something that was not embarrassment as much as it was mortification. If he had turned out to have been acting too impulsively, if he had assumed receptivity where there was only passivity, if that was the case, he would most likely find himself eating his words—Elrond was not a complete churl, after all.

The relief when Celebrimbor gently shook his head was so palpable that Elrond half-expected it to send him toppling to the floor. “I… I was going to ask if you had rethought things, now that it was morning and neither of us were fresh from drinking sour wine or contemplating the…” His face twisted. “… _everything_ about my close kin, but that answers that question. I…” His face softened into something that, for a moment, seemed as old as the mountains themselves. “…I do think that I should elaborate, just a little bit.”

The danger of withdrawal having passed, Elrond was not giving much thought to what else could pose danger or even discomfort. The danger or discomfort of those other things felt distant, in this moment, in this place. He shrugged diffidently. “Go right ahead.”

“Hmm.”

Celebrimbor paused for long moments, seemingly gathering his thoughts, though he could just as easily have been gathering his courage for what he was about to say. For someone who had learned so early on that it was better just not to talk about his family (not the perfect solution, since there were those who would condemn him even for his _silence_ , which Elrond thought wildly unfair, but the best solution Celebrimbor had in his arsenal), Elrond could see how it would take time to gather his thoughts to himself: bury them down deep enough so that they did not show on your face, and it would take time to dig them back up again. He could see also why gathering the courage to string those thoughts into sentences fit to be spoken would take some time as well. He was willing to wait. He would not force it from him. This was not a spectacle to be gawked at.

Celebrimbor balled his hand up into a fist, gently struck it against his thigh. “You might have gathered that my feelings where my family is concerned are… complicated.”

Elrond raised an eyebrow. “I might have gathered,” he said dryly, “yes.”

“No, I do not do a very good job untangling them for the benefit of my audience, do they? Well, the audience must be content with what they are given, and not ask for more.”

It was not that simple. It could not be that simple, when everyone thought they had a right to consume your life’s story the way they would read a book or watch a play. But if Celebrimbor was still holding on to that illusion, the illusion that people like them had such a right to their privacy, Elrond would not be the one to strip it from him.

“I…” Celebrimbor ducked his head, an expression on his mouth that could have been a smile, could have been him holding in a wash of sudden tears. “…I did not repudiate them out of hatred. There are days when I wish that I had. Hatred is… simple. It would make things… it would make them easier.

“I did not repudiate my kin out of hatred. For everything else that I feel regarding him, I do not think that I could ever look upon my father with something so uncomplicated at hatred. There is disappointment there, yes, _oh, yes_ ; Curufin proved himself in many ways a _thoroughly_ disappointing person.” But not a disappointing _father_ , Elrond could not help but note. “There is disappointment, and confoundment. There are many things that he, that they have done, that bewilder me, even when I think of their Oath, of what they swore by, what they swore _to_ , and what they always believed would become of them if they failed to fulfill it. I am not bound by such things, and I intend never to be snared in such a fashion as they snared themselves. I know I do not understand the sensation of being bound to an Oath secured by the _Void_ , and I pray I never understand such sensations. I can only look in upon that from the outside, and even then, what happened at the end makes little sense to me. It would have been better, would have been easier, to submit to the judgment of the Valar. Manwë could have appealed to Ilúvatar, could perhaps have found some way to sever the bindings of the Oath. The Valar would not have needed to do this as a kindness, as a sign of clemency; it was self-evident that the Oath of Fëanor and those bound to it posed a grave risk to this world.”

Celebrimbor screwed his eyes shut. “I understand the desire not to be condemned for having come to give aid to Ennor against Morgoth. Eönwë spouted some nonsense to me and to Galadriel regarding the evil of our actions, and we had sacked no cities, I had killed no Edhil. I was a little child when we left Aman behind us, and could do naught but go where my father saw fit to take me.” His voice was intensely bitter as he went on, “I fail to see why _I_ should be condemned for that. For anything that followed afterwards. But if they truly wished for an end that could have _been_ an end, that would not have been them, the two of them, fugitives forever, then they should have answered Eönwë’s summons, and submitted themselves to the judgment of the Valar.”

“That,” Elrond said shortly, though the emotion was less for Celebrimbor than it was for the shades that now clustered around them both, “would have required either of them to be even remotely capable of stopping making things more difficult for themselves.” It still felt perilous to say, but less so than it would have before yesterday. It felt a little less like drowning. Perhaps it was the company. Elrond hoped so.

And with an adult’s somewhat jaundiced eye, Elrond could see how incessantly Maedhros and Maglor had made things more difficult for themselves. Every time they were presented with a set of choices regarding what course of action to take in response to a problem, they always chose the path of _most_ resistance, the path guaranteed to throw the largest, most troublesome obstacles into their paths later. Even keeping Elrond and Elros for as long as they had could be considered qualifying, when Elrond thought about it.

The parting… Had it come earlier, unless it came at the very beginning, to say that the parting would have _hurt_ would have been a gross understatement, totally unequal to the task of describing what it would have done to Elrond and Elros both. It would have been another abandonment in what was shaping up to being a depressingly long list of abandonments for young children to endure, and the fact that Maglor and Maedhros should never have had them to start with would not have made the agony of abandonment any less acute.

But you could hardly argue that keeping Elrond and Elros had been a particularly _wise_ move on their parts, could you? The hostility the abduction engendered in, well, thanks to Elrond and Elros’s ancestry, nearly _everyone_ , rather withered the leverage that holding the princes who could be argued the heirs to the Iathrim and the Gondolindrim both could have brought them. And even leaving aside that hostility, there was still the matter of the situation regarding _food_. Elrond and Elros had been another two mouths to feed in a situation where food had never been what anyone could call plentiful, and for many years, they had been on account of their extreme youth two mouths to feed who could in no way contribute to the faction that was feeding them. As an adult, Elrond could hardly blind himself to what a drain he and his brother must have been on the resources of the Fëanorian camp.

When he forced himself into a state of something approaching dispassion, Elrond could see how much easier it would have been for Maedhros to ignore his brother’s protests, put aside his own emotions on the matter, whatever those might have been, pen a letter to Círdan or Gil-galad, and then just leave Elrond and Elrod somewhere they were likely to be found quickly, and by their own kin, as opposed to any of the increasingly unpleasant alternatives that roamed the land in those days. How much more practical. How much wiser. From a certain perspective, how much _better_.

Elrond… If Elrond ever claimed not to have wondered how things could have been different, had he and his brother been left with their own people, he would have to call himself a liar from then on out. He did wonder about it. Not every day, but still frequently. He could not help it, and did not think that anyone else in his place could have helped it, either. It was the nature of such things. When something happens to you that truly and irrevocably alters the course of your life, you wonder how things could have been different, had that thing never come to pass. You look out on the landscape of your life, out on the roads that crumbled into the dust because of that one thing that happened, and you wonder where those roads would have taken you, if they were still capable of being traversed. You cannot help it.

But even if Elrond and Elros had been left behind with their people in the bleeding and broken camp in the Lisgardh, he did not think that their childhoods would have been any happier. Different, but not better. Even had all of Fëanor’s sons perished in Menegroth alongside the Edhil they slew, Elrond and Elros would still have been born into a world where fires never stopped burning in the north, nipping at the horizon. The ruins of two lost kingdoms would still have been theirs, bones and broken gravestones, rather than anything that could give shelter.

And Elrond… In order not to make a liar out of himself, Elrond must admit it, if only to himself—and if he worried a little less about the opprobrium being more open about it could attract to himself, Elrond would gladly admit it to others, as well. He would not have chosen for it to go otherwise, if he was given the same choice again.

Before him, Celebrimbor was shaking his head, his expression inscrutable. “I think you have the measure of them, but I would expect no less. They did not make things easy for themselves. They made them as difficult as possible until the very end, and now—“ inscrutable no longer, grief washed over his face, gentle as a spring shower and unmovable as the sky above them “—now I find myself left behind, left to forge a life without them, in a world where they left too few friends, and far too many people who would like nothing better than to efface all traces of them from the earth.”

That made two of them. But even now, Elrond could not find the words to speak it aloud. Later, perhaps. Later, he _hoped_.

“Elrond?” Gentle, but not unmovable was his voice, as he looked into Elrond’s eyes. “I am not them. I do have some talent for making things difficult for myself, but for the most part, I wish for nothing more than to live in peace. I cannot guarantee that you and I will always see eye to eye where they are concerned, but I mean what I said.” He leaned forward, gripping Elrond’s left hand in his own and stroking his thumb across the knuckles. His skin was warm, touch oddly soothing. “A legacy is a heavy weight to carry, regardless of whether it is one of infamy or of awe-inspiring legend. It places many expectations, and provides no shelter. A legacy is not a house where you can live. And I do not think it is something that any of us do well to try to carry on our own. If you wish for any aid of mine, even if it’s only—“ here, his expression turned rueful “—to complain to me about how someone _else_ has compared your appearance to Lúthien’s.”

Elrond raised a quizzical eyebrow, restraining a spate of slightly sour laughter. “Oh, if anyone _else_ compares my appearance to Lúthien’s?”

Celebrimbor shrugged. Elrond thought he might have seen his cheeks color slightly, but then, that might just have been a trick of the light. “Yes, if anyone _else_ compares your appearance to Lúthien’s. I… will keep that in mind for later.”

“So there _is_ to be a later, do you think?”

Laughingly, even if the laughter was markedly faint, “It seems you do not intend to give me a _choice_. Far be it from me to pass up something that I want, if it is being offered to me so readily. If you say there is to be a later, a later there will be.”

Another wave of relief—and Elrond pushed down the idea of its ridiculousness as quick as he could, though not quite quick enough to keep it from biting at his tongue hard enough to draw blood—washed over Elrond, quick and hard enough to hit him like a wave at high tide when he was unwary of the water. “Good. I was afraid you might have woken up this morning and decided that this was all a horrible idea. I’m glad I don’t have to try to convince you otherwise.”

Celebrimbor laughed under his breath. The laughter died off his lips suddenly, replaced by something a little hesitant. He leaned forward, slipping his free hand against Elrond’s cheek. He watched closely, only closing the gap when Elrond gave him no sign of balking.

The kiss was different from any they had enjoyed the night before. It was slower, less hurried, more tender. The gentle pressure of Celebrimbor’s lips lit a spark in Elrond’s chest, but while it smoldered, it smoldered with something that felt as painful as it did sweet. So, there was still pain; it was not _entirely_ different from last night in the wine cellar. But there was a promise here that had not been whispered under Elrond’s skin last night. It spoke of the future, and the roads that could carry Elrond there, if he was but willing to walk them.

Elrond thought he might like to walk those roads, wherever they might lead. So long as they led away from where he had come from, he could not imagine they would be that bad.

“So am I,” Celebrimbor said softly.

-0-0-0-

They finally packed their things around an hour after they had eaten breakfast. Celebrimbor did not think it would take quite as long for them to go down the hill as it had for them to go up. Though they would still have to be extremely careful to avoid hurting themselves, it might be quicker going downhill than uphill, and with Celebrimbor more certain now of the path they would need to take. Still, they had no idea when the ship had set out from the port. It could be that the mariners were on their way here even now, and superstitious as they were—hardly without cause, as Elrond and Celebrimbor had discovered to their cost—who knew how long they would stay around, waiting for Elrond and Celebrimbor to emerge in the boat? Much as Elrond would have preferred to spend as little time as possible in the damp little cave where they had left their boat, he desired even less that they stay in that cave until they were able to flag down another passing ship. He wasn’t at all certain that their food would last long enough for that.

Elrond was silent as they picked their way through the town, avoiding rubble and rotting wood and the little cat skeleton that Elrond had noticed when they first walked through this place. No ghosts in the daylight, it seemed, even daylight shot through with clouds as this morning was. The sky was full of those clouds, off-white at the center darkening to something like coal at the edges, giving off no thunder and no scent of rain, but perhaps the promise of both by the time night fell. Yes, night. The ghosts needed the dark to come out, didn’t they?

The island was one ruled over by the dead. Houseless spirits ruled here. Ghosts of other natures ruled here as well. This was not a place where the living could claim dominion, not a place where the living should _try_ to claim dominion. Elrond certainly wouldn’t make any pretensions to claim what the ghosts of a bygone Age claimed as theirs. He would not linger in their domain. He would do nothing that might provoke them out in the daylight.

Himring yet held many secrets for the enterprising adventurers and explorers and loremasters-in-training. When those enterprising adventurers and explorers and loremasters-in-training resolved to come here themselves, Elrond would wish them well, would wish that their forays into the castle went differently than his had done. Elrond, scrubbing at his right hand, trying without avail to knead the last bits of the pain from his flesh, rather thought that if he was going to make his way as a loremaster, he would go searching for the knowledge by which he could prove himself and better himself somewhere else.

Whatever he had come here hoping to find, beyond treasures to impress the court, he did not think he would find it.

“I’ll tell you right now, Elrond, I have no intention of ever coming back here,” Celebrimbor remarked conversationally as they made their way to the gate. Elrond might feel as if he was keeping silent against some hidden threat of assault by the houseless spirits of the dead, but Celebrimbor seemed entirely convinced that they were in no danger so long as Anor shone overhead, and would not restrain himself. Perhaps it was because this had once been a stronghold ruled by his uncle, and the seat of his family’s power. Perhaps Celebrimbor simply did not care for the threat posed or not posed by the dead. After all, they had both faced things more terrible by far than the dead, whatever powers the houseless spirits of the Edhil might possess.

Elrond rolled his eyes. Celebrimbor’s unconcerned essays at speech gave him back a little of his own capacities, and he said dryly, “I would never have guessed.”

“No, I imagine not.” And it must have been a testament to how long Celebrimbor had had to employ every last ounce of skill he possessed in ignoring slights and pointed comments and pretending he wasn’t reacting to something when, inwardly, he was reacting quite strongly, that Celebrimbor could speak in such a tone as if he was completely oblivious to the irony that had been shot directly at him. “If never again I lay eyes upon this island, I will count myself perfectly content. I _do_ hope you have gotten enough of what you need from your trip here to present a good report to Gil-galad, though.” He looked backwards to Elrond, mouth creased slightly downwards in sympathy. “I know this expedition was of no small importance to you.”

“Indeed,” Elrond murmured, pensive.

In terms of the amount of notes he had planned to gather, Elrond could not deny that the trip had not at all gone as he had hoped. He had gotten one afternoon of notes, another full day of notes, and while those notes were substantial enough that he thought he could compile an acceptable report from them, while the reports of the riches to be found in the treasure vaults of Himring Castle would no doubt entice Edhil all over Lindon and beyond, it was not what Elrond had hoped.

He had little doubt now that, at least, he would be able to pen the report in his own hand. At the _very_ least, he would not have to stand before Gil-galad, wince as Gil-galad fixed him in one of his by-now legendary long-suffering stares, and explain to him just what had happened to his hand and _why_. Elrond would have been happier if the report he wrote in his own hand, even if that hand was still a little shaky from the stiffness and soreness that was the final vestige of the numbness and the agony that had once locked it, was considerably longer than it was.

Slowly, laboriously, Elrond forced himself to set his regrets aside. It was too late to change things. He could put together a perfectly adequate report from what he had found that first full day, and Gil-galad had said it himself, before they had left: he was not expecting for the castle to be overflowing with riches. Tales of the treasure vaults would be enough to get his attention. If Gil-galad was the man Elrond had always thought him to be, tales of the library, of so many books yet intact, fonts of knowledge that might otherwise be totally lost to Ennor, would snare his attention completely.

And Elrond? Elrond would have other opportunities. He must remind himself of that, over and over and over, but when it was yet fresh in his mind, he could remember that other opportunities would come. He had acquitted himself… well. When you put aside the incident with the ghost, he had acquitted himself well. Well enough that he thought that Gil-galad might give him other assignments that would take him away from Lindon, might become just a little more relaxed with the idea of letting Elrond travel further and further away from the capital.

It was all he had wanted—well, in regards to his occupation; when Elrond turned his gaze beyond the narrow scope of his occupation, there was quite a bit _more_ that he wanted, and much of it so tangled that he could not even put a name to it, let alone wonder to himself whether or not he should pursue it. It was all he had wanted, to put aside the reputation of the kidnapped child completely enough that no one would kick up an undue fuss over the idea of his traveling far from court on his own, or with a minimal escort.

It was all he had wanted, and Elrond thought he might have gotten enough from this expedition to reach out and grasp it.

Even if he hadn’t, Elrond would keep trying. That was all he could do.

“I think that I should be able to make this trip profitable, without needing to return here,” Elrond said at last, as he slipped out from the gate behind Celebrimbor. “Not for a while, anyways.”

If Elrond had his way, he thought that, like Celebrimbor, he would cheerfully choose never to return. But there was more to forging a reputation of something other than a kidnapped child than just proving that he was capable of going out on his own without being abducted anew or having something worse become of him. If the man to whom Elrond owed his allegiance bade him return here, Elrond did not think he could refuse him, not without damaging the fragile new reputation he was weaving for himself.

Perhaps, with all of the novelty stripped away, it would not have the same impact. Elrond was not certain that he could count on that. But he could hope.

Celebrimbor scuffed at the grassy ground just outside of the gate with his foot. “I have my own report to make to Ereinion, once we’ve returned to court. I will record the passwords needed to get into the right rooms in the castle, and I will try to plot out our path through the bowel of the hill up here as best I can. I hope it will be enough for anyone who comes here after us to do so without my aid.” Or hopefully enough that someone _else_ who would have known the same passages and the same passwords as him would have been able to use his report as cover for their own knowledge.

“And if it’s not?” Elrond asked quietly.

He probably shouldn’t have. But the words were out of his mouth before he could stop them, and honestly, the sooner they both confronted this, the better it would be for them.

Celebrimbor faltered, his jaw working. He shut his eyes and sighed. “If… If such is the case, then I suppose I have no choice. There are many things I have done without any real choice. But if I have the choice, I would choose never to return here again.”

Elrond could only squeeze Celebrimbor’s arm gently, and turn for the place where they had first come upon this overgrown, grassy field. They had many choices left ahead of them. Some of them would not take them where they wanted to go, but then, they already knew that. They had known it from the start.

-0-0-0-

The heat was rising from the waters that swirled to and fro, so close to the mouth of the cave that with each especially tremendous wave, Elrond half-expected for the water to come up over the side and flood into what, for the next couple of hours at least, would be their shelter.

The song of the Sea echoed so loudly in his ears that for the first few moments he was assailed by it, it was difficult even to think, but once Elrond grew accustomed to it, he was able to shunt it into the back of his mind, and for the most part, able to ignore it. The song of the Sea was still lovely, still appealing. It was still not for him. Still, it exerted none of its power in the interest of enticing him and taking his will away from him, still made no effort to make his life in Ennor hateful to him and convince him of how much better things would be if he took to a ship and took to the waters, and left the shores that had been his home for as long as he could remember and longer behind him forever. Still, the Sea made no effort to strip the joy from everything he had ever known, what joy could be found there. That was all that Elrond could hope for.

Well, that, and that at no point on his way back to the capital, would he hear the voice of an Edhel mingled with the indescribable voice of the Sea. He was not sure he would have been able to bear that.

Then again, the Sea did not care for those things that Elrond could not bear. The Sea would indulge in whatever the Sea wished to indulge in, regardless of what Elrond felt about it, regardless of how its indulgence would impact Elrond. He would have to learn to live with that. When he would be _capable_ of learning to live with that, he did not know, but it was something he was going to have to learn to tolerate, for it was so thoroughly outside of his control that he knew he could never have _changed_ it.

Elrond would be glad to be back on the mainland, for more reasons than just because of the nature of the island, was what he was trying to get across. After Celebrimbor was done inspecting the boat they had left at the back of the cave, making sure there was no damage that could have sunk them before they ever reached the ship, Elrond heard without seeing him walk up behind him, and felt rather than saw Celebrimbor lean down and tap him on the shoulder.

Elrond nodded his head, but did not look up. The amount of neck-craning he would have had to do to look Celebrimbor in the face wasn’t exactly appealing to him at the moment. “What is it?”

Celebrimbor’s voice was a little strange as he asked in response, “Do you still have that, that book in your pack?”

“What bo— _oh_.” Elrond scrubbed his brow with his hand, bitterness washing over his mouth as if he’d taken another swig of that awful wine. Without joy, “How could I forget?”

A soft huffing noise came from above him. “How, indeed? Do you still have it, Elrond? We never did take it back to the library.”

Elrond had always been cognizant of the value of books, of their fragility, and accordingly, of the great care that needed to be taken in their storage. He had always considered that one of his better qualities, especially considering that he’d not needed to be taught—he had relished the stories he had read in the few books that were his growing up, and unlike Elros, Elrond was perfectly content to return to the same book over and over again, if there was something there worth coming back to. In order to ensure that there would be something to come back to, he had learned early on that he had to be very careful about the way he put books back on their shelves, had to be very careful to adequately stuff broken windows with all of the rags he could find, and had learned later on that when one was moving the few books that were one had been allowed to take with them from their broken home, out in the desolate wilderness, one had to be very careful about how they packed those books, and how they repacked those books after they’d taken them out for a bit of entertainment in the evenings.

It had never been a problem. It was something Elrond did automatically. It had never been a problem.

It also meant that, without even realizing what he was doing, it was most likely that he _had_ stowed that most hateful of all books (at least in Elrond’s view, and he suspected in Celebrimbor’s view as well) in his back without even thinking about what he was doing.

Elrond let out a heavy sigh. He… really did not wish to undo his pack before they returned to the inn. But he wanted to carry that book around with him even less. “Give me a moment, and I’ll check.”

It was a matter of finding the driest spot in the cave, which ultimately made it a matter of going to a section of the cave where Elrond needed Celebrimbor to pull out his lamp to give him better light to search in. Elrond eventually found the book about halfway down his pack, just below the cleanest of the changes of clothes he had brought with him for the trip. Grimacing, he took it out, and set it, purely out of reflex, on the driest stretch of stone in that driest spot of cave.

Celebrimbor was seemingly in no hurry to take it from him, for all that had asked Elrond if he had it with him—then again, Celebrimbor had not asked Elrond to take it out of his pack, either. He waited until Elrond had put his pack back together again, waited until he had put his lamp back in his own pack again, waited until Elrond was holding it out to him, before he ever sought to take it.

Though the book must be an object of utmost distaste to him, Celebrimbor held it firmly in his hands, staring down at it with an unreadable expression on his face. “I… I am about to do something with this book. I wouldn’t seek permission, but I wasn’t sure: do you want it?”

Elrond… could guess what it was he planned to do with the book. There was a part of him that wanted to protest. That part of him believed books to be precious things, no matter how loathsome their contents. That part of him had little power to sway his heart, when it came to _this_ book. “I do _not_ want it,” he said flatly. “As far as I am concerned, you are as close to the book’s rightful master as we are likely to find, unless we go looking entirely too long. Whatever you decide to do with it, I will not stand in your way.”

Celebrimbor nodded choppily. “That is exactly what I wanted to hear. Thank you, Elrond.” He fixed his gaze on the mouth of the cave, eyes suddenly flaring with something close to fury. “Now, as for this…”

Strides purposeful, Celebrimbor walked to the mouth of the cave, feet so close to the ledge that if it was possible for wind to come from further in, not even a particularly strong gust could potentially have sent him toppling into the water below. Elrond watched him, not cautious—no need to worry about him jumping—not especially curious—he had a good idea of just what Celebrimbor intended to do—and once he was able to overcome the knee-jerk dismay that arose within him at the thought of someone doing harm to a book, Elrond had no intention of stopping him.

The best thing to do with this part of the past was to just let it die. It was the only way they could keep moving forward towards the future.

Celebrimbor was a smith and a warrior both, even if he was more enthusiastic about one than the other, but apparently he was not an athlete as well. When he hurled the book out and up towards the sky, his throw was markedly inexpert. Just a furious overhand toss, with none of the techniques an athlete would have used to maximize the distance of their throw.

But where Celebrimbor lacked artistry, he made up for it in sheer raw strength. As Elrond watched, the slim black book hurtled up towards the roof of the sky in an almost dizzyingly steep arc. For a moment, just a moment, it seemed to hover at the peak, suspended in thin air. Then, it went plummeting back towards the earth. The Sea swallowed it without fanfare.

Elrond let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

“That’s the end of that.”

Until the Silmaril Maglor had thrown into the Sea washed up on some distant shore. Until the Silmaril Maedhros had carried with him into the fiery chasms of the earth emerged from a lava flow somewhere, pristine and unblemished on a bed of obsidian. Until the Silmaril affixed to Eärendil’s brow fell from its carcanet into Elrond’s lap. But until then, yes, Elrond supposed that that was the end of that.

Elrond wouldn’t tell Gil-galad about the book if Celebrimbor wouldn’t.

After that, Elrond would have thought that Celebrimbor would have been eager to go down the treacherously wet and windswept skies and get the boat into the water, but instead, Celebrimbor sat down at the mouth of the cave, barely responding to the spray that battered his face. When asked, he shrugged, remarking that the ship wouldn’t have left the port any earlier than dawn—better to have full light, especially around the coastline, where there were more than a couple of former hills and stone spires that no doubt performed excellently as shipbreakers—and given Anor’s position in the sky, they wouldn’t be here for another hour and a half at the earliest. Why spend all of that time fighting against the currents?

Why, indeed?

Elrond would have been happier to get off of the island as soon as possible. But he could hardly deny that spending an unnecessary amount of time in a Sea-tossed boat held little appeal for him, either. Elrond had not spent enough time on boats and ships on a turbulent Sea to guess just how easily he could succumb to seasickness. Eventually, he supposed he would have to find out, and it would probably be best not to find out while visiting Elenna, if he didn’t want to spend the rest of the visit with Elros ribbing him about it _incessantly_. (It was not Elrond’s fault that Ulmo and his Maiar had decided that the waters between Mithlond and Elenna should be excessively smooth and tranquil, and that accordingly he had never found out what a _rough_ sea voyage was like.) But not today. Just not today.

He sat down at Celebrimbor’s side, and said nothing.

At length, Celebrimbor tore his gaze away from the Sea, raising an eyebrow at Elrond and offering something close to a smile, though it was too pensive to truly pass. “What are you thinking about, I wonder?”

Elrond would rather not tell him that he had been thinking about whether he could go the whole amount of time it would take them to get back to the inn without eating anything, and then have the first thing he ate after getting off of Tol Himling be fresh food, rather than any of his remaining travel rations. It was the sort of thing he thought most people would have found silly, though it had never seemed very silly to _him_. You did not understand how wonderful fresh food was, how much it was to be valued, unless you had gone a significant amount of time without any access to it.

Elrond did not wish to speak of that. The topic he finally settled on, though, “The Sea,” and adding almost absently, “and everything it’s taken from us,” was hardly any more cheerful.

It was difficult to _avoid_ , though, not when he was sitting in a cave on an island surrounded on all sides by Sea. The Sea was all around him, swirling, tossing, singing, even if its song was not meant for him. If the Sea chose, it could rise up in all its fury and do its best to swallow Tol Himling whole. Elrond rather doubted it would succeed now if it had failed before, but if the Sea essayed to swallow the island, even if it could not reach the grassy crest, it could very easily reach this cave, and suck Elrond and Celebrimbor back down out into the depths, where the only thing they could find, one way or another, was death. Elrond had watched such happen before. It was difficult not to remember, when he found himself so much at the mercy of something which had never possessed a _surplus_ of mercy.

“You could spend the rest of your life thinking about _that_ ,” Celebrimbor muttered in response, “and considering who we are, that is no small feat.”

“Hmm.”

Once upon a time, this island had been a hill, and this hill had been surrounded by a Sea that was not water but fire. The sides of the hill were assailed not by battering waves and sea-spray, but hungry tongues of flame. Once upon a time, rather than wetted by saltwater, the sides of the hill were painted black by plumes of smoke.

Once upon a time, the island of Tol Himling had been instead Himring Hill, and it had looked out upon land rather than water. Elrond could not help but doubt that the lands around Himring were ever allowed to truly _heal_ from the damage inflicted by the Dagor Bragollach. Certainly, after the Nirnaeth, it would have been burning, pillaging, and despoiling, with no forces of either Edhil or Men available to push the Orcs of Angband back. As the Ard-galen had been burned to ash and become nothing but a plain of choking dust, truly worthy of the name Anfauglith, as the forests of Dorthonion were infested by the fell creatures of Angband and became the dread Taur-nu-Fuin, so too would all the lands of the north have become hostile to anything that did not owe its allegiance to Morgoth, and even some of the things that _did_ owe allegiance to the lord of the dead and blackened lands of the north.

Not pretty, the lands that had surrounded Himring Hill after a certain point in Beleriand’s history. Not pretty, not hospitable, not truly _livable_. But once upon a time, this had been a hill rather than an island, and even if the land it was surrounded by was not land that could readily have supported Edhil or Men, land it yet was.

And then, the Valar had bade the Sea to rise up and devour. Then, the Sea had burst its banks and swallowed every inch of land in Beleriand that was not as steadfast against assaults as Himring Hill. Once upon a time, Elrond had stood on a cliff and watched as dark, ravenous water devoured every hill, every field, every tree and rock and flower for as far as the eye could see, watched as the water drowned every living thing that could not take to the air or reach the Ered Luin in time to escape the torrent. No one could withstand it. And truth be told, had Himring Hill been short enough for the water to come rushing over its crest, Elrond doubted that all the strength in the world would have availed it. Not against the Sea. The Sea always won.

The Sea would win against Elrond, in time. Once it decided that there was a game to be played, there was only one way the game could ever end.

One day.

Not now.

As long as ‘one day’ had not become ‘now,’ Elrond could do as he wished, without the enthrallment of the Sea and its song and the things it pressured the Edhil into doing.

As long as he was free to do as he wished, he would not live his life by the Sea’s whims. No matter how overpowering those whims might be.

“We had so much, once,” Celebrimbor said softly. He pressed his right hand flat against the damp stone, bit his lip as he looked out upon the unsettled waters. “We had so much, and then we lost much, and then we gained much again, and then we lost nearly all. Now, it all lies beneath these waters. There are times when I wonder if I might spy rooftops from the surface of the water, but I have never seen anything. Whatever the Sea swallows, it does not return.”

“Except for bits and pieces of jewelry,” Elrond countered, though any hostility he felt was reserved for the Sea, which was actually _responsible_. “Except for the bones I keep finding on the beaches.”

“That will soon be done with, I should think; give it a decade or two, and all of the bones will have disintegrated, or have finally been eaten by the things that live in the Sea.”

Elrond pinched the bridge of his nose. “That’s reassuring.”

With a snort, “Isn’t it, though? Whatever the Sea swallows, it does not return, except for the bits and pieces it spits out to remind us of its power, and that even when it is calm, it still has the power to kill whatever it can touch.” Celebrimbor shut his eyes and sighed. “It’s… I would like to live in peace. I would like that very much. But it seems we have a lot of building to do before we can all live in peace. What a broken land we have inherited,” he murmured, not bitter so much as just tired. “What a broken land we are left with.”

Elrond offered him a smile, even if it was a small one, a faint one. “Not broken beyond repair, though.”

He would not say it if he did not mean it. Many days, most days, if he was being honest, Elrond looked out at the broken land they had been left with, and found himself at a loss as to how to ever fix it, or heal it. When he even _could_ think about fixing it, or healing it. Many days, most days, if he was being honest, it all just seemed so _big_. So big, _too_ big for someone as small as him, someone who had inherited few, if any, of the gifts of his forebears, and yet remained in the world after they were gone from it. But whatever his gifts or lack thereof, he was the one who was left, left to deal with this world that they had left behind them. And if Elrond wanted to live in this world, if he wanted to live in this world as someone who cared about others, well, trying to put some of the broken pieces back together was something he was going to have to set about trying to do. Even if there were only a few, small pieces he could lay hands on at all.

He just didn’t know how, not yet. Truly, Elrond couldn’t even wrap his mind around it, most days. It was all so _big_.

Celebrimbor made a sound that was almost a laugh. Perhaps it did not all seem so big to him after all. Or perhaps it seemed so much bigger to him that he could not even conceive of it. “No, not broken beyond repair. I just wish I had any power with which to set about fixing what has gone wrong. There is little I can do, as I am now. Though it doesn’t seem to me as if anyone has much that they can do, right now. Lindon is still rather young. If it takes on more than it can handle, it could easily collapse under the weight, and then where would we all be? The new cannot take responsibility for the old. Not until it is more solidly planted in the ground.”

Elrond thought about that. He mulled over the words in his mind, traced them to older paths, wondered where they might go, if guided just a little to the left, and—

“Have you ever been to Elenna?”

Impulsive, perhaps, but not all impulses were evil.

Celebrimbor blinked once or twice, clearly thrown by the sudden question. “I—No. No, I cannot say that I have.” His mouth twisted, slightly perplexed. “Tell me, how does your brother’s kingdom fare? That one is even newer than Lindon.”

Elrond smiled at him, less faintly than before. “Rather less fragile than you might think.”

With a little laugh, though it was not a derisive laugh, or a disbelieving laugh, “Oh?”

“Truly. The land has found strength in its youth. It’s… I think it might give us both ideas, if we allowed it to. Ideas about what to do with Ennor, and everyone who is still trying to rebuild something good and glad here. And…” Elrond swallowed, feeling a little giddy and apprehensive in spite of every reason why he shouldn’t, in spite of every reason why it was ridiculous to feel such. He reached out, slowly, and set his hand down on top of Celebrimbor’s. It ached with the sudden pressure, but the contact and the _solidity_ of warm skin against his own was still capable of feeling soothing. Still capable of spurring him on to say, “And I’d like you to go there with me. I’d like you to see it.”

Celebrimbor stared at him a moment, saying nothing, just blinking. But then, he smiled, and at last, there was light in his smile that was a match for the light shooting through the gaps in the coal-rimmed clouds that streaked the sky. “Another adventure? So long as there are no ghosts waiting for us there, I will go if you ask me to. A land with no ghosts to call its own sounds…” He paused, visibly groping for words, before finally settling on, voice full of some strange emotion that Elrond could not name, “…delightful.”

“Elenna is too young to have ghosts,” Elrond reassured him. “There’s no room for them.”

“I’m glad,” Celebrimbor said. Staring back out at the Sea, he murmured once more, “I’m glad.”

And Elrond spent the rest of his time in the cave staring out on the Sea as well. He imagined everything that had once been everything that he had ever known, before the Sea enforced his already-growing estrangement and turned estrangement into eternal separation. Sometimes, he imagined diving beneath the surface of the water and going searching for it, for everything and everyone he had lost, but he knew that that was impossible. It had gone down into the past, where Elrond could reach and reach and reach for it, and never touch it, even if he could see it.

The past was… the past. It was not open to him any longer. Uncertain as those roads might be, uncertain as Elrond might have been that those roads would lead him anywhere better than the roads he had traveled before, there was nothing left but to keep moving towards the future.

He would keep moving. For the sake of everyone who, living or dead, could not keep moving anymore, he would keep walking towards that distant horizon, and carry them with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Anor** —the Sindarin name for the Sun  
>  **Edhel** —Elf (plural: Edhil) (Sindarin)  
>  **Edhil** —Elves (singular: Edhel) (Sindarin)  
>  **Elenna** —‘Starwards’ (Quenya); a name of Númenor, derived from the guidance of Eärendil given to the Edain on their initial voyage to Númenor at the beginning of the Second Age  
>  **Ennor** —Middle-Earth (Sindarin)  
>  **Ered Luin** —“The Blue Mountains” (Sindarin); the mountain range at the far western border of Eriador, that in the Years of the Trees and the First Age served as the border between Eriador and Beleriand. It was also known as the Ered Lindon, the Mountains of the Land of the Singers, Lindon being a name given to the region of the Ossiriand by the Ñoldor, derived from the Nandorin Lindānā.  
>  **Iathrim** —the Sindar of Doriath  
>  **Lisgardh** —A marshy region by the Mouths of Sirion, a land of reeds that grow man-high and dense as a forest. Its name in earlier drafts was ‘Arlisgion,’ translated in The Book of Lost Tales 2 as “the place of reeds” (155).
> 
> I… don’t quite know what to say. I was going to say that this was originally meant to be a oneshot, but that’s the same stinger I used in the last ‘originally going to be a oneshot, wound up being more than 100,000 words long’ fic I wrote. I’m writing this on the day I finished writing the fic, July 17th, 2020, about two and a half months after I started writing it (according to the date of creation on what would become the first couple of chapters, May 3rd), and I have no idea how many people will or will not read this. I wrote this fic because it was for an idea that I had never seen explored before. The Elrond/Celebrimbor didn’t come into my head until I was a few chapters in, and I don’t know how that will affect the readership. As of the date on which I am writing this note, a couple of days before the first chapter is set to be published, there are three fics in the Elrond/Celebrimbor tag, out of 14,859 fics in the Silmarillion tag. One of those fics is a podfic of another fic in the tag, so really, more like two and a half fics. No, I did not use any filters; this includes crossovers and fics that aren’t in English. It’s a supremely rare rarepair, and though I’ve had a surprising amount of success with such in the past (see Finduilas/Maeglin), but there’s never any guarantee that that success will be replicated with another rarepair, and one just as supremely rare, at that.
> 
> So I guess there’s no stinger to be had here. Since I’m not writing this fic for something like the Femslash Big Bang, where in order to participate I need to post something every month, I finished it completely before posting the first chapter, though I have saved proofreading for something to be done on a weekly basis—I’ve always regarded proofreading as something best done in smaller doses. Actually? Yeah, yeah I do have a stinger.
> 
> I figured out that this wasn’t going to be a oneshot fairly early in my writing process for _Saudade_. That being said, I thought for a long time that it would be considerably shorter than it wound up being; at one point, I thought it might be as short as 30,000 words, if you can believe that. As a result, I never wrote an outline for this fic.
> 
> Yes. I was flying by the seat of my pants the entire time. That has a lot to do with why I wrote the fic so incredibly quickly. I hope it wasn’t too obvious to many of you while you were reading.


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